Google Adwords - Inactive Keywords...

I've read a couple ebooks on Adwords and all of them screwed me lol they sell the books with stats such as - look at my cpc - 1-2 cents lol They advise newbies to set their Max CPC at around 10c (for search). This just doesn't work, and has caused me much frustration over time. Here is the biggest mistake i believe most rookies, like myself, make.

So you just found an awsome product on clickbank you think will sell. You head over to adwords and you set up your new campaigne (first campaigne in many cases). Your lazy like me so you link to the affilate page directly, which i believe is fine for most clickbank products - as they have their own high quality landing pages with good copy, keyword density etc etc. You hit up some keyword tools and get massive keywords lists for your adgroups. Set the Max CPC at around 10cents and you leave the computer happy as ever lol

The next day you check your clickbank account to find you made $0.00 lol devostating. You then go take a look at adwords lol turns out nearly all of your keywords are inactive haha. Here's the thing - googles quality score is based on two things mainly - the relevance of the keyword/ad's relevance to the landing page and more importantly the click through rate of your ads. I've found that the dominating factor is the latter - CTR is king. So what has happened to your keywords? Well since you've set your CPC so low, even though your ad and keyword are extremely relevant to the landing page, your ad is getting horrible positions - around 9-14 or even lower for more competitve keywords. So as a consequence your CTR is going to be horrible, thus killing your quality score and leading to inactive keywords. Then once this starts happening google stop "trusting" you as much, and you will be pounded with higher min cpc.

I've found that initially you need to set a Max CPC that will get you up into the top 3 positions. Then just make your ad better than the surrounding ads and you should start to see a solid CTR. You should start seeing a decline in your average CPC after a certain amount of clicks. When you start to see this happen you can start to reduce your Max CPC slowly. Hopefully as you reduce your max cpc your average cpc will also decrease, while maintaining a high quality score.

Anyway, would love to hear some other peoples experiences with adwords lol it isn't as easy as the ebooks make it sound.