Hello, I'm running a campaign for my web design company. I'm using broad, exact and phrase match for the keyword 'web design' and have the campaign geo targetted to just my smallish home city. The ad comes up in the blue results and the average position is 3. The keyword quality score shows 'OK'. This month shows that these has been 27 clicks Total impressions: 1,332 Total CTR: 2.0% Average CPC: £2.01 My default bid is £2.50. My question is does the CPC appear to high or would this be a fairly typical price to pay for the 'web design' keyword? Thanks DPGBB
My clients would fire me if the clicks cost that much. I have a free service called "Stump Markus" -- and someone just asked a similar question... which I answered here: http://www.marketing-ideas.org/Stump-Markus-PPC-advertising-costs.php In a nutshell, one- or two-word trigger phrases are way too expensive to bid on. In order to significantly slash the average bid costs (and improve the quality of leads), I HIGHLY recommend prepending (insert before) and append (insert after) "transaction words" to your main keyword phrases. For example: buy web design web design consultation hire web design consultant Adding these transactional words before and/or after your main keyword trigger phrases is a very profitable and very powerful strategy to attract higher-quality leads. And the best part is these longer-sized keyword phrases typically costs 50% less, too.
£2 per click isn't that unusual in a very competitive area. If you're Quality Score is 'Great' then you know that your competitors are paying (at least) the same sort of money. That being the case, you need to look at your keyword list. As MJ (above) says, look at the long tail - exact match on "web design consultation" is probably cheaper than phrase match on "web design". But the bulk of the traffic is likely to be on terms with a lot of competition, so as long as you're bidding on your 'sweet spot' (most profitable) position, then you'll just have to live with the prices. Just make sure you keep trying to improve your clickthrough rate...
Hi CustardMite, The keyword quality scores are OK. I need to work on these, though I'm not exactly sure, I think the relevancy is good so maybe it's the CTR that lowers the keyword quality scores. So As you said I need to work on the ads and ad variations.