Why My Keyword CPC Bids are Sky High?

I started working as a PPC executive with an online marketing agency in India 7 years back. That time agencies were struggling high time to get good paying clients in India. UK & US agencies were keen for outsourcing their monotonous and manual work related to paid online marketing, which was happily taken by my company. That was the first time I learned about bid optimization. Rules were very clear and we use to raise bids penny by penny every time. Raising bid by 5 pennies used to be a head turning topic.

After 7 years when my subordinates handle similar kind of accounts, their major worry is to optimize account to attain lowest bid as possible, it really makes me nostalgic. I discussed it with many colleagues and experts and learned following about bid hikes:

• Many advertisers focus on staying at top positions and doesn't care about bid amount. This raises overall average required bid for that keyword and even lower positioned advertisers has to pay that.
• Amateurs setup campaigns in an irregular manner that automatically makes them pay high for a keyword.
• Various keywords in single account qualifying to show ad in an auction. This makes keywords compete with each other and losing keywords see an elevation in required minimum bid.
• Highly searched keywords always have high cost due to increasing companies & competition in the market.
• Poor CTR on many keywords.
• Lack of regular bid optimization, keyword cleaning, ad copy optimization etc.

Nowadays every business whether small or big wants its presence online. High competition in every field makes the task of keyword bid management difficult. Still there are few things that are under control of an advertiser. For example:

• Structure the campaigns in a way so that there are no keywords contesting within the account.
• Keep & add good amount of negative keywords so the ads doesn't appears on irrelevant queries. This protects the CTR for many keywords.
• Don't over bid for any keyword just for the sake of staying on top. Monitor the positions which gives you maximum results and then target those positions.

There are many other ways to saddle the keywords and their bids. But it comes with hard-work of monitoring performances regularly, doing required analysis and staying updated about the advertised industry.