Low Bids Kill AdWords Campaigns – Here’s Why

Oftentimes clients are willing to “try” AdWords to see how successful it is for their business, but the problem with that scenario is that if you don’t jump in head first, you’re never going to see the full potential of an AdWords campaign. The goal of a campaign is to attract potential customers who are actively searching for your services. If you aren’t spending enough money to let your ads show up at the top for those searches, they may not ever click through to visit your website.

It can be difficult to understand why you can’t just put $100 towards ad spend and evaluate the results, but we’re here to explain the spiral of events that occurs from setting low bids with a low budget at the beginning of a campaign.

Low Bids = Low Position

Let’s say, for example, that you aren’t willing to spend more than $2 per click, so you set this as your maximum cost-per-click. If you’re bidding on keywords that cost around $4 per click to be on the first page, there’s a chance that your ads won’t show up at all. You’re already setting the campaign up for failure. Don’t go into this process with a low cap on what you think a click should cost. Fewer high-quality clicks will always be better than a large amount of low-quality clicks, so don’t be afraid to pay a higher price for this highly-targeted traffic.

Low Position = Low Click-Through-Rate

It’s proven that higher ad positions have higher click-through-rates. Achieving this top spot requires having a high Ad Rank, which often comes with a higher price but also includes other components, such as Quality Score. Quality Score is determined by the following factors:

• Ad relevance
• Landing page experience
• Expected click-through-rate

Low Click-Through-Rate = Low Ad Rank

If you’re hung up on keeping the bids as low as possible, we’re already hindering a major component of Ad Rank that decides where your ads get shown, because a low click-through-rate will negatively impact the Quality Score.

Expert Tip: Our advice is to be willing to spend what it takes to give your AdWords campaign a fair chance when competing for ad position. It’s about finding that sweet spot where you’re comfortable with your overall spend while still getting a positive ROI. We can build you a great campaign, but it’ll never get a chance to shine if it doesn’t have the budget to assist it.

AdWords is a difficult beast to tackle along with all of your other digital marketing efforts, so it’s important to have an AdWords expert on your side. Clients succeed when they choose The Web Guys to manage their AdWords campaign. Contact us today at (317) 805-4933 to get the conversation started.