I found an affiliate program that I want to promote using Adwords.

I went to google and did a search on what I thought would be the perfect keyword phrase to bid on, and no results came up in the Sponsored Links. Does this mean that nobody is bidding on this set of keywords?

If nobody else is bidding, can I just bid 1 cent on the keywords and guarantee myself the top and only listing for that keyword phrase?

Not necessarily, there are numerous other scenarios that could be taking place. It could mean that the advertiser(s) bidding on it have paused their campaigns, or that their campaign has been slapped. Also, it's possible they have simply maxed out their budget for the day.

wouldn't it be grand if you could bid .01 on everything, unfortunately no, you'll most likely have to put a min bid of 15c or something even on a zero competition adword. why? your adcopy might suck, your keyword might suck your domain might suck... your ctr might be horrible, google has to calculate all these factors b4 you get a stable bid, what i mean by stable is, sure you can throw up a campaign and bid .05c on a keyword and it'll maybe work for a day or 2, but then the google formula analyzes everything and adjusts the bid accordingly, heck you might even just get slapped. Put it up as a real campaign first then see what happens, unfortunately w/ all these new google formulas you can't just make a 2second campaign and expect results anymore.

nope depends on your QS, just because there isn't any advertisers doesn't mean you will get $0.01. Its all about relevancy

I think it's almost imposible to get $ 0.01 bid, I found many keyword with zero bar, but I still find competitor, and my smallest bid $0.04 no change even I get better CTR.

Yup, its virtually impossible to get a $0.01 bid. There are many different factors that will affect the bid such as relevancy and Quality Score.

I didn't think about the limit for the day being reached, it was almost midnight when I checked.

I checked again this morning and got the same results.

I started a campaign with a max bid of 5 cents with about 10 different keywords that had no competition when I searched.

The item isn't in ClickBank, so maybe that's why there aren't any advertisers.

I'll post back if they let me have any 1 cent clicks.

You might want to think this through a bit further.

I'm not saying that you didn't find a little goldmine; you might have.

But the fact that there are ZERO competitors for the "perfect" keyword for a product that has an affiliate program would immediately strike me as a bit odd and I'd dig in a bit deeper before spending too much time/money building out a campaign. It could be that there's no competition for a couple of reasons no one else mentioned.

1) The market sucks balls and all the smart money has already left after finding out there was no money to be made.

2) you could be bidding on a keyword that's impossible to effectively monetize. I've seen keywords that I KNOW people would love to own, but google won't run ads on them because you can't create a relevant ad or landing page because of the super broad appeal of the term. Take for example: hxxp://www.go*ogle.c0m/search?q=football

When I run that search... no competition. for the keyword football???

That's because no one can figure out how to be relevent enough to make the g00g happy with their ads. Or no one can afford the $35,000 per click price to have an ad there.


Food for thought.

One other thing:

You said "The item isn't in ClickBank, so maybe that's why there aren't any advertisers."

I don't mean to be a smartass, but you do realize there are hundreds of other affiliate programs and networks right?

Just checking.

I hope you've struck gold. Let us know.

Scuba,

You raise some really good points.

Yes, I know there are TONS of affiliate programs besides ClickBank. This specific item is run on the owners site through their own affiliate program. They are using the amember script.

I'm sure the market is pretty small, but I bought it.

I only bid 5 cents per keyword and put the daily limit at $20 so I'm not risking much.

Could be a goldmine, probably a dud. I'll check it after a week and see what happens.

Just trying to create 10 campaigns that make $10 each per day. Then 10 more.

Your whole post was great, but it's interesting that you don't see any ads, I see ads all over the place when searching for football. Heck, when I do the "see more sponspored links" it shows 21 pages.

Don't get me wrong, your post was invaluable so not trying to discredit you or anything.

It's strange how google wouldn't display you ads but google shows plenty of them for me. I can't help but wonder if something similar is happening for the thread starter.

it could be the IP address issue... the country that he is residing in does not have the advertisers advertising on them...

I have quite a few campaigns running right now that have multiple keywords that we're paying $0.01-0.02 CPC for. They get traffic and some even have a reasonable amount of competition. QS is a far more involved and complicated process than most people realize.

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blackhatzen

how can you get that?
is there any secret method to inflate Adwords QS?