So far I've been able to maintain a nice 5% or 6% CTR for a few highly search edkey phrase. However, these phrases only had 1 or 2 competitors. In a competitive niche, I believe the concept is to temporarily be the highest bidder to get a good CTR and then to slowly move your bidding down. Google supposedly puts you in the top spot if your CTR is about 5% or 10% even if you bid low. At least that's what I heard. Let me know if I'm wrong here.
Google do normalised positioning - basically meaning when they take into account your CTR to work out your quality score, they know that on average x% is average for position 1 for that keyword, y% is average for position 2, etc. They then rate your CTR accordingly. This is what I assume happens anyway. Therefore you can split test and improve your quality score even if you are in 5th position as opposed to top position. Natural listings, I find can make a big difference though. If they are appealing, it can be sometimes hard to get visitors into your website on the right. Like I have some misspellings in my account yet a few of these when searched, have natural listings which I think answers a lot of the searcher's question.... so I don't get many clicks and my CTR isn't as good as it would be if the natural listings were poor.
Well, it seems that if you're in a competitive niche and you bid low, you're ad will often appear on the second or third page since some people are bidding really high. Most people don't click on sponsored ads after the first page.
maintaining a high CTR for non competitive keywords will have the same effect as maintaining a high CTR for really competitive keywords. It makes not difference. You getting all confused with big numbers like 5% CTR. This means nothing.... 5% CTR can be crap for certain keywords. Its all relative to position, competition and keyword history. Example scenarios You have a 5% CTR in an avg position for 1.5 for keyword [not so competitive keyword] but competitor X has a CTR of 8% in position 1.6 and googles average history for position 1.5 is 7%. Guess what... your 5% which looks so awesome is crap... its junk and your underperforming. So don't get oohhh and awwwed by big CTR numbers. They mean nothing if you are not outperforming competition and googles averages. Now for example You have a .50% CTR in an avg position for 1.5 for keyword [really competitive keyword] but competitor X has a CTR of .25% in position 1.3 and googles average history for position 1.5 is .35%. Guess what now... Your measly little 0.50% means 100 times more than your 5% under performing CTR on example above. Take position normalization into account and stop focusing on big CTR numbers. High CTR numbers usually equal low volume and little competition where as low CTR numbers usually equal lots of search volume to choose from, but also everyone wants a piece of. But they want a piece of it because they know it converts and converts often.
Well, I know I was performing well because I was maintaining about $.10 per click with the 5% CTR. My website was also 100% relevant to the phrase I was going for because my domain was the key phrase. I also had the key phrase in the title of my ad.
Some guys are bidding low and getting the top spots because of their great account history, (solid ctrs, solid quality scores etc..)