Hello everyone! This is going to be my first time using adwords.. I need some tips..for example..what's the BEST way of minimizing costs per click?
Your absolute best way of minimising CPC is to make your Quality Score as high as it can be. That means effective and relevant ad copy, with a high CTR, and a good landing page. With a high quality score, you can bid lower for the same position. Some people suggest overbidding initially so that you place artificially higher, which improves your CTR thus bringing future bid costs down and saving you money in the long run. Whether you can afford to do this depends on your budget.
Yes, maximize QS which means increasing CTR. Here's the link to a book that explains how to increase CTR. As for overbidding to place higher, it does not increase QS. That's a myth. Quality Score is normalized taking position into account. If you get a 7 in 8th position, you'll get a 7 in first.
How granular is the normalisation? Is it taken across the entire range of search or is it subdivided by some method?
This is my 2pence, it's all well and good to make sure your quality score is high but it's still going to cost you more at first to raise your quality score, for me to keep costs low it's the keywords you are going to use, more importantly if it's relevant to your industry then use longer tail keywords because in general they are more targeted to customers and they tend to convert better plus it will cost you less. I'll give you an example, say you are using adwords to sell a web design service. If you go for the keyword phrase "web design" it's going to cost a lot because it's a very broad term and lots of other campaigners will be competing with you for that. So in this case the service in question can do word press websites which is a service offered. So if you target "wordpress web design" you are targeting customers, there is less competition so hence it's going to cost you less. You can use this for any business or industry. The more you do it the more you will learn it's all a learning curve. Good luck with your campaign. Taz
I'm not sure I understand your question. But the way I suspect it's done is the historical CTR calculated at each position (probably just on the first page or the top 20 or something like that) and a fudge factor calculated from the midpoint. So say the midpoint is position 6 where the historical CTR might be 2%, the fudge factor might be 0.1% for each position away from the sixth. The CTR used for QS calculation for position 5 would therefore be 2.1% and the first 2.5%. I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than that but this gives you an idea. It's the same kind of calculation businesses use to take into account seasonal effects on their bottom line.
Ah, mostly what I was asking was where the data for the historical CTR comes from: does it come from the entire dataset across all keywords, or just the data for that particular keyword? If it's the second, what would they use to normalise new keywords? Would they revert to the global average? Mostly these are just speculative questions. I suspect that Google keeps this sort of stuff secret.
Of course for each particular keyword. Doesn't make sense to compare keywords from totally different niches does it? New keywords? That would be rare indeed. And it would not be new for long. I'd venture to say there really is no such thing. For sure Google would not revert to a "global average" (assuming you mean all keywords). There's always synonyms and other tricks to figure out your keyword, even if you misspell or invent one.
Make sure you take into account your final ROI (return on investment). I mean, if your CPC is high but you're also getting a lot of sales (and making a profit based on Adwords spending) then you're doing good! In the end you want customers to buy your products/services/etc. so be wary of making changes just to make Adwords algo's happy.