What sort of conversion rates are normal for the Overture/Adwords adverts? What percentage of people clicking through to a site should actually end up buying something?
AdWords between 1 and 10 % roughly on our accounts. Scroll down this page and see 'Similar Threads' . Disgust asked the exact same some days ago. ( http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1049 )
For us, we've varried in this range too. Ou overall site conversion is around 4-5%, but for some things we're lower than 2% while others we are above 8%. So it really differs on the product.
We see a 2% CTR and a about 0.8% conversion rate Not too great but it works out profitable in the end. One reasonable sale pretty much pays our whole adwords budget for the month.
We see a wide range of conversions, based upon the specificity of the keyphrase. For more general terms, we could be in the 2% range (or even lower); for very specific terms we could be above 10% without trouble. The conversion rate you need (and the price you can pay per click) is completely dependent on what the visitor is worth to you (conversion on your site and profit per conversion). Like some others, each sale for us generates many thousands in profits, so we can afford to spend a few bucks per click and a relatively low conversion rate. We also find that Google converts much better for us than Overture, because we're targeting a business audience.
if you don't mind me asking, what exactly are you selling that results in thousands of dollars in profit?
We have not tried Adwords or any other form of advertising due to our high placement in the SERPs for our primary KWs. Questions: do any of you place ads for any KWs where you already place in the top 5 on Google? If so, why and what percentage comes from the SERP and what percentage from the ad?
Disgust - Rereading my post, I guess it sounded kind of mysterious.....we sell fairly expensive business-to-business software; compared to consumer it's low volume but high margin. SEO AM - we advertise for certain keywords that we also place in the top few in main results. Main reason I do it is that we have a limited number of quality keywords for our business and I want to make sure I get the people who can't/don't discriminate between the paid/free listings. Unfortunately, I don't have any data that could confirm that this makes sense, though my gut is that it does.
I have seen a lot of retailers that have .25% conversion rate which ain't that good, all the way up to some retailers converting on niche items at 6-8% or more. I believe amazon converts at around 3% overall. For B2b where you mostly just want to generate leads, 5-10% is doable for most niches I have tried. Also with b2b there are a lot of people that just pick up the phone and call, which doesn't show in the conversion reports but brings in a lot of business. Once we started tracking this we realized just how common this is, but again, it is really variable by industry.