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