Yesterday I received some shocking news. According to Overtures Bid Tool my top competitors are bidding in the region of $4-$6 a click on my keywords! Now, their not really competitors as my site advertises their products (much as Froogle or Kelkoo do) - however I do want to steal as much of their traffic as possible as my main source of income comes from the 10% commision I receieve on any sale I send. Here's my problem: As I understand it Quality Score (and/or Ranking) in a very simplified way = CPC x CTR If that is true then I need a CTR of 16.7% for my campaign (not keywords, campaign) in order to be ranked near my top competitors with my measly $0.36 CPC allowance. If I could improve my conversion rates, or up my average sale I could just throw more money at the problem, but i'd rather up the CTR and pocket the profits So my question is therefore is this feasable? Can a CTR of around 16.7% be achieved? Perhaps its worth noting that I'm in a highly competitive market with over 90 other ads to compete against and at the moment over all of Googles search sites I average a position of between 15 and 20 (I do not use Content Network). And also at the moment my campaigns best CTR is 3%....
Hehe, well in my experience if you could get 16.7% CTR you've either discovered something revolutionary or totally broken the ToS. Can YOU imagine getting 16.7%? That's one in every 6 people clicking on your ad. What's your market? What about just going for natural search results with good ol' classic SEO techniques? It's the cheapest and you'll learn something in the process.
My market is Virtual Commodities and Real Money Trade, my keywords centre around "wow gold" 16% does sound rediculously high But then I can't afford to spend any more Per Click. I have tried to optimize the site for organic SEO, but its very difficult as it is essentially a search engine, so although the content is valuable and relevent it is very difficult to get spiders to like it, or even get to it as its pretty brief and to the point. No articles or review here The homepage has a page rank of 5, which I think is Ok, although I hear PR isn't what it used to be. Hmm. Any more thoughts anyone?
Pay Per Click advertising Click thru rates of 16% plus are definitely achievable. My recommendation is to run test copy. I suggest 3 or 4 different ads per keyword. Wean out the weaker copy and gradually refine the stronger performing ads.
I have some adwords phrases that regularly achieve over 20% CTR. My primary campaigns average closer to 12%. 16% CTR doesn't sound ridiculously high at all.
Well that sounds like promising news. However have you guys got 16% and up CTR with a CPC that is only 1/10th or 1/20 of the top bidders CPC?
I agree with dburdon's comment and would add that you should look at what ads are running on Google search results page for similar keywords. Run several ads at a time and Google will sort out which ones work best and you can refine from there.
This is pretty much what I'm doing. I have a single campaign to handle World of Warcraft. Then within this I have several ad groups, all using the same keywords (I'm keeping it simple, and also can not think of any disperate groups other than trying 'world of warcraft gold' over 'wow gold'). Each ad group is geared up with 2 ads to A/B test and keep refining what seems to work. So far this hasn't yeilded much more in terms of CTR from what I originally had, around 2-3% CTR on most ads and keywords alike. Maybe as high as 6% on a good day, but its difficult to say when i'm only gettig 10-15 clicks a day on average (which is only about 1/3 of what my daily budget will allow). It seems to me my ad copy is actually as good, if not better than the other ads on the search results page, however I have much less money to spend over others (approx. 10% of their budget as this is my commison). I'm building a new WoW Gold landing page to see if that help conversions or quality score. But I cant see how if would really
Ok here we go. Here's my new langing page as it stands right now: New Old Better Quality score? Better conversion? Or just crap?