Google announced Monday on the AdWords blog that users would no longer be seeing “Inactive for search” for keywords and instead would be given a first page bid estimate if their bid was too low. Many of you may have missed this little tidbit in the announcement because it was somewhat couched in their announcement that Quality Score would now be calculated for each and every search at the time of the search. That’s just fine by me and I really don’t have any problems with the first page bid estimate either. I’ve been guesstimating it for awhile since showing on the first page is critical. A majority of users don’t ever go to the 2nd page, so I see the merit. However, in reading the post from Google I noticed a couple of disturbing answers in the FAQs they posted:

 Finally, for first page bid estimates, many of you were interested in learning how these would compare to your old minimum bids. 

For queries without many advertisers competing for placement, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with a high level of advertiser competition may have significantly higher first page bid estimates, because you’ll likely need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than your competition and show on the first page.

Google saying their estimates will be higher? Sounded a bit fishy to me, so I did some research and here is a screenshot from an account:I don’t know about you, but this sure looks like Google is pumping up the “estimates” in order to get people to up their bids. These keywords are showing on the first page at these bid levels as evidenced by the average position. So is Google trying to pump up their revenues to satisfy Wall Street?