Our gain is the Diplomatic Corps' loss
Lord, now you've put me on the spot.
Your adwords position and cost is made up of your bid price times your click through rate times your quality score rating.
1/ The idea is to have small groups of keywords (ad groups) that are all closely related... eg carpet cleaner glasgow, carpet cleaner glasgow etc. These are (normally) best in exact match). Your ads should tightly fit those keywords.
2/ You then produce a highly optimised landing page (optimised for those terms only). We had sixty different pages for the telecom ecample (some clicks were £ 24.00 + !).
3/ Google checks the page and gives it a quality score.
4/ You then do very targeted ads for just those searches. The more targeted, the more likely to match the searcher's intent and (normally) more clickthroughs (=higher percentage click through rate). You do two or three ads to test against each other and you keep going with the best performing ad (higher click through rate).
If you get these two right you will be able to rank well above someone who is paying a lot more per click.
HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU?
If you have hundreds of keywords in one group, there is no way they are going to give a good match. Some will perform great and others (most) will suck. These lousy ones drop the quality score (how relevant is the ad to the keyword and landing page) and the click through rate (same reasons) right down. This is why negative keywords are so important (to get rid of the stuff that is irelevant).
So, your bid price rockets yet you still may not reach the top spots.
Hope that makes sense.
Garry.
