Highest You Bid When Starting

Status
Not open for further replies.
M

makethatmoney

New member
Mar 1, 2008
320
2
0
When you are testing a campaign what is the highest you will bid in PPC?

A niche I'm working in right now is $3+ for position 9? WTF!

Do you typically have to spend this much to gather data? Seems like I'm going to get KILLED unless I get some insane CR.

Thanks
 


The most I have had to bid for a new campaign was $12 CPC, just to be on the front page. Within 2 weeks, I was in spot 3, with a $3 Max CPC. Owned.
 
Yeah, some niches are $9-$15 for the first spot but with a good ctr, account history, etc another person could be paying $1.50-$2.50 for the same spot.
 
No real answer, you just have to test it. That's why it usually takes some money to fine tune a campaign until it is profitable.
 
You just have to set a budget. The problem is, if your budget is small, it can take a long time to test offers enough to optimize everything.

Also, it really helps to know your market. While it would be tough to compete with a keyword of car insurance....adding in city names, age groups, high risk situations, problems people might have getting car insurance, etc., can really make campaigns more effective (and cheaper too).
 
You don't know ROI when you start a campaign, do you?

EDIT: Or do you mean target ROI? Ideally I'd like 50-100%+ but realistically I'd probably work for as low as 10% - cash is cash.
 
Last edited:
I've heard about people starting out at 1/3 of their payout as the max bid. Although this can add up quickly. It can cost a lot just to gather data. Some people spend thousands just to gather data. If you don't have that money to spend, you'll probably want to try and target long-tail keywords. Or have to find another niche to work in with keywords that will cost less to bid on.
 
makethatmoney said:
You don't know ROI when you start a campaign, do you?

EDIT: Or do you mean target ROI? Ideally I'd like 50-100%+ but realistically I'd probably work for as low as 10% - cash is cash.
Click to expand...

When I started, I tried to control my bids so I could get at least 2-3 weeks of data before I 'ran out' of money for the campaign.

Initially, I was spending a whopping $10/day because I only had a finite amount of cash to invest in AM and wanted to aggregate some history before I made the big money decisions. Now, I spend $90-200 a day, but keep it under wraps when things get slow. Most of my bids are in the $.20-$1 range, depending on keyword. I got some good advice about ad groups and quality that let me get higher for less money, but by and large, managing cashflow was more important than finding the magic bid amount.

I certainly understand how tough it is to 'guess' when you start a campaign and don't have the cash on hand to play around with what works and what doesn't.

At the end of the day, I'd rather extend out a moderately performing campaign than run out of cash trying to find a great campaign. At least until you have $1000-2000 a month to spend on PPC.

Waiting for checks is also a bitch, if you don't hit that $1000K/week mark that some networks want you to be at for a few weeks/months before they EFT you weekly.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom