Couple of questions about keywords

[ryeguy]

When I bid on a phrase match, let's say "blue widgets", and someone types in "blue widgets for sale" and my ad shows and is clicked on, what is my CPC based on? The phrase match of "blue widgets" or the exact match of [blue widgets for sale]?

How is CPC driven down? I know it's by getting a good CTR, but is it per campaign or per keyword? For example, let's say I have "blue widgets" as a keyword, which has a high CTR. I also have 9 other keywords on my account with terrible CTR. Will my CPC for "blue widgets" be low while the other 9 are high, or will my whole campaign's keywords, including "blue widgets", be high because overall the campaign is bad?

Is there any downside to having a lot of keywords that aren't getting many impressions (not saying that the CTR is bad, just that no one is searching for them)?

 

[broski]

Yoski,
- Phrase match is phrase match, it doesn't revert to another match type unless you put it there. If you have multiple match types of the same keyword in an ad group/campaign then Google uses the most restrictive match type. Exact will give you a lower CPC.
- CPC is not just driven down by CTR. I didn't see anything about quality score in your post which is most important. Quality score takes into account ad relevance, lp relevance and keyword relevance. High quality score = lower CPCs. Stay above 5 and you're doing alright.
- Depends what you mean by "a lot of keywords" and "not a lot of impressions." Search engines don't like it when you have thousands of keywords getting 0 impressions. Its a burden on their servers to account for all of them in the auctions and can hurt the overall quality of your account.

Someone else chime in if I said anything retarded. Otherwise, RyeGuy, please watch the following video before asking anymore questions:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/c96LTLlaXew&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/c96LTLlaXew&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
PPC Video