In your opinion what is the best, most effective way to lower CPC? #1- Simply lower what you are willing to pay (and sacrifice position) or #2- Increase your CTR by testing and tweaking your ads? #3 Is there another method? Thanks Veronica
hi veronica! With adwords, is simple. You must bid high on the beginning, like for the top or second position. This way you will get more clicks (although more expensive) but you will rank better on relevancy, and quality score. After just a few days you will check that the minimum bid needed for a specific keyword had been lowered. For instance, let's say you advertise on the keyword youtube. You would want to deactivate content network ads this time... Now let's say that the youtube keyword minimum bid is 1 dollar. The guy on the top position is biding about $ 1.5 You shall bid 1.55 (leave some cents margin) for let's say, 3 or 4 days. At the end of day 3-4 you will see that the minimum bid have dropped to 80 cents. You can now lower your bid to 1.45 and still be in the top position due to quality score. the whole process repeats itself until the minimum bid for that keyword reaches 20 cents. This way, you can bid 35 cents for that keyword, and still be on the top position, while the other guy is biding 1.50 and in the second place. I've tested this way several times, with all keywords.
Working the quality score is very important. Use smaller groups of keywords and ads and monitor closely. Remove keywords and put them into different ad groups if they do not perform to get the good ad groups well positioned. Christoph
Yeah i use the same tactic as Alignak. Bid higher initially to get a 'forced higher CTR%'. Then gradually lower your bids and hope that your position maintains. But this might take weeks to slowly lower it till you're paying real low bids & still getting good positions. One trick is really to tweak your Adcopy to make it look interesting. There have been documented examples, that between a well-written ad vs a unique ad, usually the unique ad wins. (not across all markets!) Eg: Auto Loan Quotes Get Your Auto Loan Quotes Here. Fast. Free. Instant Approval. www.yourdomain.com v.s. Auto Loan Quotes . Free Quotes - Get Them Here. www.yourdomain.com This is just an example of how 'white space' can be used, and I have seen people with CTR in excess of 10% for ads like this. But if you're focusing on conversions rather then CTR%, then forget this altogether as they are probably not pre-qualified traffic.
I guess you will have to be very cautious in the initial period when you start off with high bids. You will have to check your account everyday to ensure you are not spending too much due to the high bid. Try to work on finding some good keywords, especially the long tail
I do agree with the "bid high" method, but generally only if I am bidding on a severely well targeted keyword, say the name of a product etc. As the most cost effective measure I have had almost 100% positive reults with simply making sure my ad is placed on the first page of results (position 7 or 6), increasing my daily budget to an astronomical level (of course you won't be paying anywhere close to that but Google will run your ad continuously no matter what 24/7/365) and then, the most important step... Make your ad stand out! The best way to do that is to see how everyone else is presenting the offer and do the opposite. If EVERYONE is using keywords in their title, meaning they are all bold and standing out, you don't do it, and then YOU stand out. Just analyze the first page of results, write a compelling ad that will stand out (play with where you place keyword bolded terms in the copy etc.) Prosumer86 is right on when it comes to using whitespace as well as anything else. I once had a ad that only said one word on each line. It started out as a test but it converted into sales at almost 8% for close to 30 days before the bidding wars broke out and killed it for everyone. (Artificial google adwords market inflation! )