There are Inconsistencies in Google Adwords Minimum Bid Prices

The title says it all and I’m sure I’m not the first to notice it but with all the quality score updates, algorithm and scoring changes within Adwords, it is quite possible that Google has lost control of accuracy.

A little background on where this post began: I’ve been searching for new keywords to put in one of my client’s accounts when I decided to include the Company Name + Product number in their account. These keywords would be something similar to PPClab X1234. Very obscure and probably extremely low traffic I still wanted to include the words for testing purposes. I checked the SERPs for about 33.6% (lowest effective sample size, thanks Stats101!) of the words to insure that I wasn’t going to stumble onto some high traffic budget eating word from another industry. 100% of the words I checked had blank search results, which is what I expected. I went ahead and dropped all 700+ words into the account with a min bid of .10 and gave the system some time to soak up my changes.

A few hours later I check the account and I see the following message: Two of my 700+ made up words have been marked as inactive because their minimum bid was too low. From all the digging I’ve done, I can not tell why these keywords are required to have a minimum bid almost 3 times the bid of the rest of the words. The landing pages are specific, the ad texts are shared and their SERP pages are blank as well . Their Quality Scores are “OK”, which is lower than the rest of the words but don’t understand why their bid prices would be so much higher.

The only thing I can think of is probably no surprise to anyone, inconsistencies in Google Adwords Min. Bid Prices but I think it is always interesting to see the data behind it. Does Anyone out there have similar problems or a solution?