Change Bid for Keywords

[sunshine2010]

Hello! I am brand new to this, and I need a little help with Adwords. I have read all of Tims' stuff on it, and then I spent a LOT of time on Mike Rhodes' site, looking for the answer, but I'm still a little confused.

I set up my Adwords account and keywords just like Mike Rhodes said to do it. It has been running for a couple of days now, and I would like to raise or lower my bids for some of the key words, to keep them in positions 3-6 like Mike said. On one of his free introductory videos, he showed how to change the bid for individual keywords. However, the screen he shows on the video looks different on my Adwords account.

I cannot figure this out. Maybe the interface has changed, or maybe I have some setting done wrong. Can anyone suggest what I am doing wrong or where I could find help?

Thanks! I appreciate this forum. I have learned a lot!

[MattInglot]

Adwords did change their interface pretty recently. I honestly don't use the online interface - managing a campaign of any decent size is very cumbersome. The better tool for this is the free Adwords Editor program by Google. It has a Keywords tab that allows you to change settings (such as bid) for all the keywords you select at once (meaning you can change hundreds or thousands of keyword bids). Even better is the Advanced Keyword Bid Adjustments option (somewhere near the bottom of the screen when you have Keyword tab open), which lets you adjust keyword bids as a percentage of the existing bid, or relative to the 1st page bid estimate. This is really nice because you can for example increase or decrease all your bids by say 20%.

[sunshine2010]

Matt,

Thanks for the advice. I went to Adwords Editor and did what you said. First of all, next to my keywords, it says Max CPC Search is on Auto. Is that the problem? Then I tried the Advanced Bid Changes at the bottom and when I put in to increase the bid by 50% it said "The changes you specified will not alter the bids of the selected items.Please confirm that you've selected all the items you want to edit, and that the changes you've requested are reasonable for your selection."

Suggestions? Adwords is so much harder than I thought! Thanks!

[MattInglot]

It sounds like you have automatic bidding on, which means Google chooses your bids and you can't individually customize them. It's a nice way to "start" a campaign, but you'll want to set the bids yourself realistically.

This is how you turn it off:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&lev=answer&cbid=-o7p23dnskwbj&answer=113241&src=cb

Explanation of bidding options:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99484

Good luck!

[sunshine2010]

Thanks, Matt! I think that was the problem!

Can I ask you another question? So, yesterday, since I couldn't change the bids individually, I went and raised the bid for the whole campaign, just to see what would happen.

I noticed that my ads were much higher up, and a couple were even at the top on the left side. Then, today, they are all gone. Is this because other people have their campaigns set to automatic first page bid, and have knocked me down? Now I am not showing up anywhere. I paused the campaign for now.

Any suggestions on the best book or resources to learn this stuff? I know I have a lot to learn.

Again, thanks for taking the time to help a newbie! :)

[MattInglot]

Umm it honestly depends on what you did to your bids... you want the bids on your keywords to be at least equal to the 1st page bid estimate (you can get into a lot of discussion on this, but for simplicity's sake...). If you set your bids below that, you'll tank your campaign. Similiarly recognize it's a competitive process with others bidding, so the higher your bid, the more often you'll appear. Having a higher campaign daily budget also affects how often you'll appear because Google does it's best to fill your daily budget, and if you have it set too low it will hold back. But I doubt the latter is the problem here.

If you are looking for lower pricing, work on improving your quality score. It's a column you have to set Adwords Editor to show you. You want a QS of at least 7 and preferably 10. Having a higher quality score over time leads to lower first page bid estimates.

I actually just wrote a post about building effective Adwords campaigns for my company's blog, but the blog isn't really live yet (this is literally the first post), so I'm really jumping the gun by linking to it. However it's got information I think would help you. If you have any feedback on it, I would appreciate it.

http://www.tiltedpixel.com/index.php?p=blog.ViewPost&post=12

[sunshine2010]

That was super helpful, Matt. Thanks! I liked the article, too! Good luck with your new site!

[Monkiii]

Thanks for a really nice article, Matt. Some nice nuggets of wisdom there.

Hope the new site is working out well for you!