AdWords Select bids double of Overture

AOL making big difference

[raja4]

I feel I am in trouble here. I cannot see what my competitors are paying at Google to maintain their rank in AOL sponsored listing. According to Google a rank on AOL is mix of Bid and popularity of an ad. as per an email from them:
4. Increase your maximum CPC if necessary. Only the top 3 AdWords Select ads will be shown on AOL for any given search result. Your ad's position is determined by its clickthrough rate and your maximum CPC, so you may want to increase your
CPC to help improve your ad's position.

WHy Google does not offer something like we have at Overture?

[chiyo]

We have found google's rates to be double or more than Overture since the start. This is true of Any term which met the min. click through rate - not the first ones we tried where the cost was similar to overture but got canned after 1,000 exposures with less than 5 clicks.

Im not sure why just increasing disctribution and exposure, albeit significantly, should cause people to up their bids, apart from keeping in the top 3. The ROI may well reduce for many terms as it is going to a competely different demographic. And ROI may increase on other terms - say for consumer items.

you still pay per click (googles note says only adwords select is in, "not adwords original").

[sparrow]

We've gone to Adwords Select on Google. Their policy is based on price and Click-Through Rate (CTR). I've noticed that the more click throughs we get the less we pay to stay in the number one position.

I have notived that the price for listing each phrase has gone up, but the deal here is to get the customers to click on the the advertisement.

In my opinion Google is trying to impress upon people to relevant with their ad's. The more revelant, the more clicks, the less you pay.

Does that make sense?

I doesn't matter what you competitor is paying, what matters is the relevance of your ad.

[seoboy]

i've noticed the same thing - google CPC pricing seems exorbinantly high...even for terms where there is apparently NO ONE ELSE listing. and especially for a system where i garner so little control of the outcome.

if they want "more relevant" listings, then they out to make it easier to create customize, per-keyword titles/descriptions. something like a keyword spreadsheet would do the job.

as it stands, the setup is MASSIVE for a big keyword strategy, if you want to customize all your listings. in overture its a snap. and even if you do go through the headache with google, you still risk getting axed with the stupid "click relevancy" algo, and being forced to MODIFY all the damn listings in the hopes of reactivating them for a week... so its not clear its worth the effort to customize, in the current system...

are you listening, google?

seoboy

[chiyo]

Our pricing problem with Googs Adwords Select is same as seo boy. The minimum bids are very high compared to Overture. In some areas we are paying 35c for Google and 7c for Overture, and Google takes our ads off if we dont meet the minimim clik though ratios, in overture we are there all the time.

These prices are high depite the facts we rarely have any competition for the keywords. It seems to work like this. Say we want keywords like "advertising agency". (not real words we are targeting for competitive intelligence reasons!) OK. The minimum bid is say 28c. But we dont want to have all those generalis clicks, so we add the term "malaysia". Now despite the term now being targeted much more, less clicks, and less exposures, the minimum click DOES NOT GO Down! In some cases it goes up! to 35c.

Now I know we could reduce the impressions to "Malaysia" only but we are looking for clicks from Europe and North America only, as they are our usual clients. So that is not sensible.

In the case of Overture the min bid is always 5c, and we can get in the top 2 positions usually by increasing this bid to 7 to 18 cents depending on the keywords. The more specific the term, the cheaper it is to be at the top. Most cases it is sub 10c compared to Googles 18c to 25c for any position.

That is why Google Adwords is of limited use to us. They seem to quote the minimum bid price for any of the words in the keywords. Adding a limiting word does not seem to decrease the bid price.

I dont know whether this is a feature, a problem with their system, or a way for google to have higher revenue, but it makes Adwords very difficult to return a satisfactory ROI for more specific terms. Until this is changed we cant use Adwords much, and therefore continue to rely on overture.

I do hope Google can sort this out to create more sensible minimum bids when adding a more specific (or limiting) term to the keyword string.

[sparrow]

I have to disagree with you somewhat here. We are using a two word key phrase on Overture and Google, and right now the cost of this single phrase is .66 on overture and we are in 3rd postion. At the end of the day yesterday the same words were .64 and we were in 1st position. We had a click thorough rate of 5%. I'd like to get that up higher, which would then mean I would pay this, it is just a completely different playing field and I think it is a more LEVEL.

[Mardi_Gras]

>>They seem to quote the minimum bid price for any of the words in the keywords<<

Chiyo - I have wondered about this, and I think you may be right. My experience with Ad Select has been much more like you and Seoboy describe than sparrow's experience. My keywords are very targeted travel industry terms, and I am #1 in overture for less than $.15, in most cases.

Google, on the other hand, requires over $.60 for similar keywords and I'm only in the #5 spot.

I think Overture is still the model to beat for PPC. Ah-Ha's system works well, but unfortunately no traffic :(

AdWords Select seems to needlessly complicate and confuse the PPC model - with (for me) minimal results.

[sparrow]

Mardi_Gras

What are you ranking in your CTR's?