Adwords Cost?

[Breckenridge Real Estate]

How do I determine what people are paying for adwords?

[Duncan Pollock]

I'm fairly certain that you can't.
However, what does seem possible is three things:
1. You can look at how many ads are presently shown on your own keyword pages (i.e. the ones in which your site appears for particular search phrases) and from this you can make an intelligent guess as to how fierce your competition is. If -- as seems to be the case for local real estate categories -- there's only one or two personal sites (vs "corporate" or "directory" ones), you can probably keep your bid down to a reasonable amount. More particularly, this can simply be whatever Google is suggesting (as they do when you create a campaign), along with their suggested Daily Budget firgure.
2. Following all this, you can check to see your Ad position. If it's in say the first four, you can, I think, assume that you're paying the right amount.
3. In any case, one of the great features of AdWords is that you'll only ever pay 1c more than the next highest bid. And, given this, if you look at the figures in the Average CPC column of your report it starts to become apparent how much others are paying . For instance, today I'm showing the following:
real estate agents st. catharines $0.82
real estate for sale st. catharines $0.77
houses for sale st catherines $0.58
"homes for sale st. catharines" $0.13
which tells me:
a) There's a (quite wide) variation in cost per click (and therefore bid prices) within one of my campaigns.
b) Whether the total click cost for the day is within the Daily Budget I've decided upon.

Duncan