PPC how long "to eat" the inicial cost?

[BigBadWolf]

I'm looking into giving PPC a new and serious go after playing around with it somewhat successfully a year or two ago. (I since then moved on to try other things etc, and got out of adwords, but gona give it a more serious effort as I now have some cash to "blow")

I know their are very big PPC players here so my question is I'm getting a new account and start my very first add, I know Google now has a history thing so I need to get a good CTR. Some people advise bidding high and "eating up the costs" to get that high CTR and then start gradually lowering the bid price.

My question is for how long should I do this? X amount of click, X amount of days? until I cant start lowering the bid prices and hopefully due to the high CTR still have top placement.

Regards

 

[lylaster]

You look at the average CPC and it'll naturally fall by itself overtime

 

[cashflowrusty]

The idea I have seen thrown about is if you want to get a GOOD CPC, you have to throw some money, in terms of higher bids, at the campaign. This is IN ADDITION to all the other stuff you have to do to get a good QS, like content, relevance and all that.

One way is to figure out the amount of clicks you want. If you have a generic, drawing, but non-very-targeted-ad and have to bid higher to get it showing decently, then do it, get 50+% CTR, and then you should see the CPC getting lower. You can then SLOWLY lower the CPC you are paying, to something manageable. Lower it too far and you may not be able to pull the same trick again, by raising it up again.

Does it work? I dunno. Never said I did it.

 

[vladi]

It works. I did it many times. What I dont know, and doubt many people know, is the formula google uses for this. For example, I could go into a niche and bid $5 per click and set my daily limit to $20 so that I dont kill myself. I'll likely be in the #1 spot if the rest of the ad and site is spot on, but I'll only get a handful or two of clicks before my daily spend limit of $20 has been hit.

At that point, my click through rate might be 30 or 40%, and I could run this for a month and eat up $600. But is that any better than me setting the daily limit to $100 and running it for 6 days? Essentially I get the same number of clicks and the same spend amount, only I have done it in 6 days vs. 30 days.

I dont know the answer to this one, although I have read the theories. Lucky for me, I have the bank roll to bid high for a while and take a beating on it, usually causing my competitors to have to bid high to try to get in front of me, but they usually outspend themselves and I win in the long run anyway.

 

[Mansun]

in one of my absoultely virgin accounts it took about two months for Google to estimate CTR and lower cpc. Topic - software, CPC was ~0,30 in the beginning, then lowered to ~0,15.