Schmidt responded positively by saying that this was a unique situation and that ad would run for the benefit of the 5 people searching per year.
Bogatin then asked if this ad would get bumped to $5 or $10 per click. Schmidt side-stepped the answer and told Bogatin that an AdWords specialist would be contacting her to discuss the issue in further details.
I can't stand responses like that. Obviously Bogatin was from the press and didn't have a search term that received 5 searches per year and she had a 100% CTR. She asked for the same reason we all would ask, information.
True to Schmidt's words an AdWords specialist did indeed contact Bogatin and said, "Advertising a rare product or service on a specific or rare query does not always result in the ad not running or the cost-per-click (CPC) being high. If, for example, a rare disease only gets 5 search queries per year and each time someone clicks on the ad, the ad will have a 100% click through rate. This is a very relevant ad and will have a very low minimum CPC. The rarity of the search term or the amount of queries it receives doesn't matter. The ad will get a high minimum CPC if the advertiser is advertising on popular queries for which most users don't find the product relevant. Advertising a rare product on a popular query doesn't serve our users well and is likely to get a high minimum CPC."
The interesting part to me wasn't actually related to the questioning, but was this part, "The ad will get a high minimum CPC if the advertiser is advertising on popular queries for which most users don't find the product relevant."
Basically what we knew already, if you have a low CTR, keyword prices might be high. But it is a completely different story to see it written down by a Google employee.
Now if we could all find a niche where there was no competition, thousands of searches per month and an affiliate program that paid $30 per action.
That's what I would do if I were Miss America, forget sprinkling flower seeds all over the world!
