I'd be interested to know if anyone has determined whether clickthrough rates from AOL's sponsored listings are greater than Googles.
The reason I say this is that AOL lists the sponsored links at the top of search returns, like overture.
It would appear that you have to have a top 4 adwords listing at google to appear in the AOL listing - is this correct?
Thanks,
Jon
Don't chase CTR - you don't work for Google. Chase sales - The bottom line!
We get lots of clicks from AOL and few conversions.
it all depends on what you are selling and their core demographic.
after all AOL recommends them to the sites :)
Shak
(You have email)
Hard to believe but true.
Adwordsadvisor please tell us when this farce might end.
{eyes rolling}
Just because it did not work for you does not mean it is a farce.
Businesses (yours included) are free to construe their offering in any way they see fit (thank goodness).
Customers are free NOT to be customers.
we had a CTR of over 4% and were disabled as most of the traffic is our preferred demographic - kids - coming in through AOL and ASK.
It doesn't seem they use Google as much as A/A and other partners.
And we know they convert so this is a critical success factor to keep this going.
What I want is to just be able to buy AOL impressions through AdWords - but I know this will never happen.
I was bidding on a keyword (paying 5 cents) and getting about 0.5% CTR (~50 clicks/dy) and then all of a sudden for some unexplained reason I got a CTR of 5% (2000 clicks/dy!). I thought I'd been scammed somehow but checked my Clickbank account and I'd made $1000 in 6 hours! But then as quick as it had come it went, and I was back to my normal CTR.
The interesting thing was 95% of my sales were to AOL email addresses. And even with 5% CTR my keyword was classed as 'At risk'! This thing with AOL not counting towards Google %'s may explain it. I think I got lucky and made it onto the AOL top 4 listing and that's where my traffic came from - I'm struggling to get back onto it - one reason seems to be sites are getting listed that don't always appear on Googles listing - as if they have low daily budgets, which affects their appearance on Google to only every 100 impressions but appear everytime on AOL.
Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
Try putting the petal to the metal (at least 3X of what the interace suggests) for a while with a brand new adwords account and see what happens.
Track it as closely as you can.
My experience is this will get you what you want.
Let us know.
If you ads are not ranked high enough to appear on AOL you settle in on a certain level of impressions/clicks/cost.
Raising your average bid, which could move your ad up only one position, and appearing on AOL can easily double or triple your impressions and skyrocket your costs (higher bid price plus more clicks).
Just an observation from my experience.
I'm not sure what you mean Chewy about the 3x rate, I presume you mean to 3x the recommended budget?
And why should there be the need to set up a new adwords account?
Your comments are appreciated. Thanks.
