content sites and sales

[justshelley]

I have a client that requested that I turn on the option for their ad to be seen on the content sites. In 8 days, the CTR's went from an average of 1.6 to .4 for the entire campaign. The content sites account for 80% of the impressions, 40% of the click through costs and 32% of the actual click throughs. My client has some some tracking in place but cannot give me specifics on whether there has been any difference in sales over the last 8 days. My biggest concern is the decrease in CTR's affecting rank/bid price and the possibility of having terms disabled. If the account wasn't so big, I would probably set up a second campaign for content sites only but I can't do that at this time. Anyone have feedback on actual sales differences when they have content turned on/off.

[skibum]

shelley,

We almost always opt-out of content. The content CTR does not figure into whether or not your ads will continue to display, just the CTR on Google.com matters.

Occassionally it seems content works but most of the time and the only thing that realy happens is that the number of clicks and associated costs go down and leads or sales stay about the same. This will definitely vary by industry though.

[FromRocky]

My biggest concern is the decrease in CTR's affecting rank/bid price and the possibility of having terms disabled.

I dont think the content site's CTR will have any effect on ad position or status. CTR from the Google search will be the only one to be used in these calculations.

[webdiversity]

FromRocky is right.

The issue I would have is the client not giving you any feedback on whether sales are better or (as I suspect) worse.

40% of the click costs will have to play havoc with the overall ROI, regardless of whether it made a jot of difference to CTR.

It's a common thing and it always seems to happen on Google where the impact of this sort of client behaviour is so dramatic.

We have a current new client asking us to turn the cost down over a 3-5 day period, when the current CPC is about as low as it can go. I think on day 2 we will be calling for the priest to read the account the last rites. One day they'll accept that you can't play with fire.

[eWhisper]

40% of the click through costs and 32% of the actual click throughs

This means you're paying more for content syndication than for search clicks?

That's not something I see very often at all, seems a bit backwards.

It seems if they still want to use content syndication, you can use the technique posted quite a bit lately of splitting your content and search bids into seperate campaigns to at least lower you content bids.

[vibgyor79]

>>> but cannot give me specifics on whether there has been any difference in sales over the last 8 days.

How do you mean by "cannot" give you specifics?

Get them to install the Google conversion tracking code. If they refuse to implement the code & refuse to give you some idea about the sales tracked through their in-house stats, then they aren't bothered about ROI.

To be effective, the PPC campaign manager should always know what's happening on the sales front.