CPC broken?

[deilenberger]

I was looking at my CPC numbers the other day using Adwords editor - and found to my surprise - that many of my search words/phrases that were costing me the most, also showed an average CPC higher than my permitted/set CPC allowance.

I've emailed Google on this - and so far just got back a confirmation that they received my message.

Anyone else seeing this? If so - I think their CPC is broken, and lots of us deserve refunds...

[abbottsys]

I've never seen this. But remember, if you've recently reducing maxCPC it's very possible to see an Avg. CPC that's temporarily higher.

[deilenberger]

The operative word is "IF" - and I haven't touched the maxCPC on these words in over a month, and it's the last month's data that I'm looking at.

[AdWordsRep]

...that many of my search words/phrases that were costing me the most, also showed an average CPC higher than my permitted/set CPC allowance.

I've emailed Google on this - and so far just got back a confirmation that they received my message.

Contacting AdWords support is the right thing to have done here, as they can look at your account in detail.

That said, in my experience the most common reason (by far) for what you've described is that AdWords allows an advertiser to set a default Max CPC bid for an ad group, as well as individual Max CPCs per keyword, for any or all keywords. These individual Max CPCs will 'trump' the default bid for the ad group.

In the past I've seen many advertisers set higher than default bids, per keyword, for their most important keywords - and then kind of forget that they've done that.

In any case, deilenberger, I hope that support will get to the bottom of things quickly for you.

AWR