Minimum Bids at AdWords Spike Again
Posted: July 11th, 2008
The minimum bids for keywords in Google AdWords are influenced by many factors such as advertiser competition, the relevancy of the ad’s landing page, as well as the time it takes to fully load the page. Since click through rate (CTR) is also included in a campaign’s "Quality Score," it’s a good idea to focus on connecting to your target audience, and more specifically, knowing their language and culture. Using the right slang and jargon could give you an edge in bettering click through rates.
In the past week, more and more AdWords advertisers have been experiencing sudden spikes to their minimum bids. These overnight changes have been attributed to poor Quality Scores from low quality landing pages. Just as improving Quality Scores is a good way to pay less for keywords, the opposite holds true too.
There were many cases of minimum bid punishments when the landing page component was first internalized into Quality Scores, but that was a long time ago (December 2005). Since then, it’s only been an intermittent report here and there. Search marketers are speculating that the recent widespread spikes are from landing page load time issues. As Google representative AdWordsPro Sarah said in a Google Groups thread on Wednesday,
… we recently started taking page load time into account when determining quality. If your page is slow to fully load, this could also be responsible for the bid jump.
For those being affected, I would suggest improving the relevancy of your ad with your landing page, and possibly finding a more reliable web host that guarantees uptime. It would also be a good time to consider a website makeover with clean semantic xHTML and CSS. Tables are so yesterday. 
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