Estimated clickthrough for an Overture "top-3" campaign?

Just need a realistic number, not the "perfect" number...

[Winooski]

I'm trying to develop an estimate for a client, but I have very little experience doing PPC (my way of saying, "Please excuse the dumb question I'm about to ask...").

For a would-be Overture campaign, I'm able to get the minimum top-3 bid amount [uv.bidtool.overture.com] (i.e., the minimum amount my client would have to spend at the moment to be able to appear in 3rd place) and the estimated monthly term requests [inventory.overture.com]. However, I'd be wrong to simply multiply that minimum top-3 bid by the estimated requests, because that assumes that 100% of the people who request the term would click through our listing. I know it has to be a fraction of that at best.

What's a more realistic/reasonable clickthrough percentage to use for the purposes of this estimate? 1%? 0.01%?

[seth_wilde]

The click thru rate varies dramatically by the phrase. Overture does some nice reports that take into account previous click thru rates for specific phrases. You can get these for free if you spend enough with them, otherwise you need to pay them to set up your account.

You can view a sample here
[overture.com...]

[edited by: seth_wilde at 6:33 pm (utc) on Feb. 26, 2003]

[Travoli]

>dramatically

Yes, could be 1% CTR, could be 30%.

You will need to start with low bids and work your way up to your budget.

[Eric_Winter]

Hi, Winooski.

I would take the Overture numbers with a grain of salt. In my experience there is not a big difference between being number 1 and being number 3 (now 4 actually, since Yahoo is showing 4 up top).

I concur with the others that it is very difficult to estimate clickthrough since results will vary greatly.

Factors include:
-How "on target" your product is for the term.
-Whether you have any brand recognition with searchers.
-Copy writing in title.
-Copy writing in description (remember visible description is not always the full description),
-Etc.

All that said, for the purposes of the proposal, I'd say 2%. That should work as a qualifying gut check for your client and 20 clicks per 1000 searches should be an easy number to achieve (and exceed). If you are able to do a range, say 2-5%.

It's important to tell prospective clients of PPC management services that PPC campaigns start dumb but get better with time when you measure performance and adjust.

For our clients, we use ConversionRuler to get ROI data for each keyterm that shows us where we need to buy more search and where we need to shut terms off. It ads $40/mo to the campaign costs but is what you need to increase PPC yield and improve ROI over the long run.

Good luck.

[Winooski]

Seth, thanks for the head's-up on the Overture reports.

Travoli, thanks for the input.

Eric, thanks for the rough estimates and software recommendation.

Would it be appropriate for me to ask other people for their PPC software recommendations in this forum?