Minimum Bid – Learn About AdWords Minimum Bids

“Minimum bid” is a feature that was previously shown within Google AdWords accounts. The metric has been replaced within AdWords by “first page bid“. Despite this fact, there is still a minimum amount you’ll have to pay to see your ad displayed, and it is still relevant to your pay-per-click efforts and AdWords bid management strategy. In this tutorial you’ll learn:

• What minimum bid means.
• The importance of minimum bid to you and your PPC accounts.
• How to lower your minimum bids and optimize your paid search accounts.

 

What does minimum bid mean?

Minimum bid refers to the minimum amount you are able to pay for each click to have your ad displayed against a query. Minimum bid, or minimum CPC (cost-per click) bid, lets you know how much you have to set your maximum bid to have your ad show for a given keyword (first position bid operates in the same way, with the exception being that you are told how much you have to pay to appear on the first page of search results).

Minimum bid works similarly across the search engines. Each of the major search engines features a variation of Quality Score. Google, for instance, notes that:

“A minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bid is assigned to each keyword in your account based on its quality (or Quality Score). The minimum bid is usually the lowest amount you can pay per click in order for your keyword to show ads.”

So, lowering your minimum bids (and thus your cost-per click) is dependent upon raising your Quality Score.

Lowering your minimum bid for PPC

The major factors you need to be concerned with in achieving a high Quality Score for minimum bid are:

• High click-through rate – Your ads are clicked on often by searchers.
• Tightly related Ad Groups – The keywords within your Ad Groups are deemed “related” by the search engines.
• Relevant Ad Text – The text contained in your ads relates to the keywords and queries you are attempting to have it shown in response to.
• Relevant landing pages – You send people to a page that has content related to your ad and their query.
• Historical performance  – Evidence of strong relevance over time will help your overall account metrics including Quality Score.