The Adwords Experiment: Week 1

Catch up on the Adwords Experiment here!


The Bid: $.01 per click.  That was the hard upper limit of the bid. Much like bidding on Ebay auctions you can enter $100 per click if you want to and the system will only charge you the amount necessary to outbid everyone else.  But to force the bid to the lowest possible, put it on .01 cent per click.

The Limit: $10.  Just to make sure the campaign doesn't run through all $100 of the budget on a single day.

The Results:

Adwords results:

Bidding a penny on 19 keywords which all have low competition resulted in four clicks.  And only on the first day of the campaign.  What's interesting is that the Average Cost Per Click is four cents, when the bid was a penny.  There is some kind of inefficiency in the system, or perhaps operator error, which caused the clicks to cost more then the penny bid.  As there were so few clicks, we can't be sure about the reasoning.  But this may actually be an informative error.  We may accidentally know that we get more clicks at four cents, then at one.  However, we're going to stick to the procedure and increase the bid one penny per week.  No conclusions can be drawn yet, the experiment is just beginning!  And kind of  suspenseful start too.

If you have any idea why when bidding one cent, the system charged four cents, leave a comment!  Someone explain if this was an error, or behavior that we will see more of in the future.  Week 2 coming up next!