AdWords First Page Bid Estimates.

Here is a handy hint that will save you lots of money.

If you have just added new keywords in AdWords, please *ignore* the first page bid estimates.

e.g.

first-page-bid-estimates

You can see these bids are set much much lower than the first page bid estimates which means that they should get very few impressions indeed.

But (unless these keywords have no commercial intent, your ads are rubbish, and your account is very badly structured) check back in a day (or less) and you should be pleasantly surprised by your average positions, impressions and clicks.

On the other hand, if you were to increase your bids to at least £1.25 as Google suggest, you would probably find the next time you checked that your average position was 1, and you had spent a hell of a lot more money than those keywords were actually worth to you.

The main reason the first page bid estimates are so high initially is because the Quality Scores are so low for new keywords. These should change pretty quickly. I’ve seen QS change from 3 to 10 in the space of one day pretty often!

For anyone who finds this a bit hard to believe, here is some proof of what things looked like 12 hours later:-

first-page-bid-estimates-next-morning

You could argue that Google will adjust quality score based mainly on CTR and it doesn’t know what your CTR is until your ads have run for a while, but if you look at the screen shot above, you will see that QS has been adjusted massively upwards without there being *any* clicks. If I was not a Google Fan Boy, I would say that this was nothing but a cynical money making exercise by Google…

If anyone has had similar experiences, or have any proof of their own that I am taking out of my backside, I’d love to hear from you!

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