I noticed that some of the inactive keywords were the ones that were doing the best for me – at least, they are important to be associated with the FM brand, were getting a fair number of impressions, and a decent clickthrough rate. They included the names of some of my most popular blogs in the FM network. Hmmm, I wondered. Competition for these site’s keywords must be heating up, and my (admittedly) lowball bid must be getting bumped off the list.
So I fired up Google and entered the keywords to see who was bumping me off – I wondered if perhaps FM’s competition was doing it.
Guess what? In several cases (including Dooce and Metafilter), no one else is bidding for the term. In many others (including the name of this blog), only one was bidding, or in some cases two – but by no means was the term “full up” with ads.
This is very odd to me. No one is competing for the Adwords I want to buy, but yet Google was telling me to raise my bid as much as 15 times my original price – a price that was working fine just a day or so ago.
Can anyone enlighten me as to why? Am I missing something obvious? It sure feels, well, off. Is someone gaming me? Is Google? Or is this the way the company gets you to pay the equivalent of a phantom CPM – for getting a lot of impressions, but not getting a high enough click through rate? Innaresting….
Update: Google has pointed me to this post…