Adwords: Bidding

[J from Michigan]

I'm starting to get suspicious of how automatic bidding works.

On a whim, I dropped my auto bid amount down to pretty much nothing, to see what would happen.
And now, my phone is ringing off the hook... at 1/4 the price!

I'm trying to take "seasonal" services (gutter cleaning/holiday window cleanings, etc...) into consideration, but still...

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I think that having a higher bid doesn't necessarily get you better position clicks, but in fact... lower bids drive down the overall bid averages.

Did that make sense?

[luisfshort]

hi J,

I'm not an expert, my experience with Adwords has been similar to yours. If you let adwords do auto-bidding for you, you'll end up overpaying. I had better results by aiming really low, and go up from there to see when your ads get triggered.

Of course price isn't the only consideration as to when and where your ads get shown -- for example, if you have relevant text on your site, and a well-written ad, then Google should give you some boost for that. So do some research on LSI (latent semantic indexing) and see if that helps.

[J from Michigan]

Thanks for the reply... I'll look into LSI, as I have no idea what it is.
Appreciate the advice.

I raised my daily budget tonight, so we'll see how that works with the lower Bidding... tomorrow should be exciting!

[patrickz]

The more time I spend trying to figure out AdWords the more confused I get. I am going to turn off the automatic bidding and see what happens. Thanks for the tip and I'll let you know how it works out.

[CikaPerica]

I really don't understand how Google can provide automatic bidding.

Isn't Google in conflicting interests because trying to reduce cost for it's clients, but in the same time trying to earn money for itself?

[J from Michigan]

It's not a conflict if you are someone like me, who is a little intimidated by it... and just leaves my settings at 'auto.'

I'm starting to get a little more nerve to play with it. Meaning, I'll push the most competitive keywords (that I'm not on page 1) and ease off the ones I'm doing ok on my own with.

So, I'll manually bid high for "widgets for sale" to keep at the top of the page (even if it is a paid ad) and back away from "widgets in Oakland County Michigan" because I've got that covered.