Now Every single time this has happened, advertisers have made positive comments about Premium Listings. outperforming Adwords by quite some distance.
What I can NOT understand is why more people do NOT use Premium Listings instead, I know there are a number of reasons, such as:
High Entry Cost
NO inventory available
CPM rates are very high (when doing CPC analysis)
but the most common one:
Lack of Contact from Google in this department!
(GoogleGuy u reading closely).
Now from my personal experience, I have NO problems with ANY of the above, especially the NO contact bit.
If push came to shove, I would phone Head of UK sales on her home number at 3am to spend some money, and I am sure she would not complain, this is the attitude I see at Google UK...Customer Service...Customer Service...
So either there is a problem in the USA, or better contact channels are required by Google in relation to Premium Listings.
The reason I am making this posting is for fellow members to realise that Google Premium Listings is a very good marketing tool, "often" cheaper than Adwords as NO bidding wars are being played.
Shak
=====================================
latest campaign stats across Europe on Premium Listings:
Impressions: 71,943
Clicks: 9,637
CTR: 13,40
The highest creative achieved: 20.04 CTR
The lowest creative achieved: 7.27 CTR
(the above are based on creatives with at least 2,000 impressions), there are other niche keywords with a few hundrded impressions achieving up to 100% CTR.
======================================
(personally, I too pick right-sided ads over top ones)
What was the problem, no sales? Is your industry large or small profit margin? I had great results when I was bumped up to premium, but now I am debating paying for the premium listing I was planning.
We get about 45 cents a click using premium listings. Granted we may get a few less targeted leads, but I doubt it's worth paying 4 times more for Adwords.
My decision is made on this basis: if Adwords costs less than the 45 cents a click we can achieve through Premium Ads, there's little reason to upgrade to Premium, and vice versa. There are some other considerations, like target volume, but that's basically it.
We tend to use both services, opting for Adwords for cheaper keywords.
[edited by: SlyOldDog at 1:50 am (utc) on Jan. 24, 2003]
The problem I have is Premium Ad-Words are not per click but per impression and you have to sign a large contract. Changing keywords is also a pain.
I got a small rug for being in Premium Ad Words.
WOW...pretty good the best I ever saw was about 7 but mostly 4-5.
The one thing I really don't like it's the way they keep increasing the CPM price. Every 6 months when it's time to renew we are guaranteed a price increase. I like how they always say "You are a good customer otherwise it will be much worst"
100% within a year increased on CPM and we spend between $15,000 to $20,000 every month.
It used to be a very good deal a year ago now it's probably ok but we start to cut down on our spending with Google and put our money elsewhere. There are better deals out there.
The only problem is to get hold of the Google people who are always in meetings and it takes a whole day and lots of phone calls to change anything of the advert. With a very competitive enviroment where price is very important the system becomes inefficient.
Please Google, you need a better extranet where you can change the copy yourself and so on without depending on anybody from you. Even if you need to change your password you need to call/email them.
Otherwise, brilliant
Thanks
all solved at 9.24am UK time.
Shak
Cheers?
Jose - I don't care if someone knows that Premium Ad-Words is working great for me. It is not and I have a very high CTR. Also, you cannot get some of the keywords on Premium Ads because they are full. If you use the regular Ad-Words Select you can always get any keyword you want... assuming the Ad-Words Select is functioning properly. I do the same thing you do on my Ad-Copy and don't have a 30% CTR. That seems higher than my GOOGLE rep told me was ever achieved and my keywords are very, very targeted.
Did you know that 2nd Premium Position has about 3% CTR higher than the 1st Position even thought is less expensive?
thanks
Curious,
Brian
We tried Premium listings last year. With the CPM and CTR, we could not match the ROI of Overture, even after 5 KW phrase revisions.
[edited by: Travoli at 2:20 pm (utc) on Jan. 24, 2003]
Reflect, both have a click through script and I have a ROI script.
Travoli, yes, we had a lot better luck with PPC Engines.
SlyOldDog, I think it would be A LOT BETTER if the listings appeared as the #1 & #2 search engine listings and maybe just highlight them or make them bold. It could also say GOOGLE preferred listing. I think that would be huge.
powerstar, I think it is only three months but it is still a big contract regardless.
No experience with the premium listings, but our adwords average around a 2% "buy" rate according to our online store stats. We don't get a lot of hits on some, but a few range as high as 9% for specific niche products that are hard to find.
We found that the less generic and more targeted adwords (same on Overture) are, the better ratio we get. The problem is that there are a limited number of those keywords to use.
Just a thought....
I think that the biggest benefit of AdWords over the Premium Campaign is the syndication over Google's network of partners.
Traditionally CPM's for a network distribution are much lower than for a single site even when all sites in the network are of the same perceived quality.
a lot of the partners decide to sell their OWN specific premium keywords.
Premium listings are bought on a CPM basis, and it would be impossible to ESTIMATE number of impressions on partner sites (could depend on a number of factors), whereas Googles own tool can give quite a good guideline as to number of impressions (based on past performance).
Shak
That probably is why more people do not even try it........
Google should find some of it's best adwords clients and let them sample "premium" for the cost of adwords, but not at random. Goggle can inform the customer of his keywords that are not used in premiums and then the client can flag one for testing usage. In a short time the customer will soon know the ROI & CPC and will better be able to make a decision.
NFFC, it only goes to show how much customer service counts for. I don't know how much you have to spend, but I assume it is over $5,000 per month if you are heading for premium.
Google as a whole needs to learn a very valuable lesson from this exercise and never forget it, PLC or not, a sale generating $60K+ per year can be made with a 4 line post and a nudge in the right direction;)
Nice job Kate:)
