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I am new to the whole Pay-Per-Click system, so please excuse me if some of these questions seem some what obvious or ridiculous. I am doing my dissertation on Internet Marketing (tactics, technologies, etc) based on a web site I will build.
I am trying to get some kind of rough projections for the costs involved in using PPC to generate leads, (as opposed to selling a product) i.e. the visitor phones in or emails. I would be very greatful for any answers to the following questions:
1. Which are the best PPC services to use, and what constitutes a good PPC service, UK related only?
2. What are the kind of click-thru percentages can you expect, I saw a post in this forum
stating:
Position 1 = 40%
Position 2 = 25%
Position 3 = 20%
Rest = 15%
Is this fairly accurate?
3. I used overture's keyword tool, and found that on keywords related to the web site last month there were over 4000 searches on these keywords. To get position 1 on the related search engines the cost was about £1.75. So assuming a 40% click-thro rate, that would be about 1600 clicks * £1.75 = £2800 for that month on those keywords.
Is this correct? Are the number of searches overture shows fairly accurate?
4. From click-thru’s is there any kind of rough percentage of those that then go on and fill in a form or email/phone? I guess a lot does depend on the site design. Maybe the figures would be similar to that of subscriptions to a web sites newsletter?
5. Also is PPC bid management software necessary? Any recommendations?
6. Any other facts/figures/thoughts of relevance would be appreciated?
Many thanks, I will post the research for my dissertation when it is completed, it may be of interest.
On point 3. the 40% is 40% of the clicks and not 40% of the searches. The real figure will vary wildly per sector, we work on around 7-10% so in the above example the 4000 searches would yield arounf 280-400 clicks.
I use a software-based bid management tool to manage about 500 words. It works pretty well and was fairly inexpensive compared to the asp-model tools.
I agree with webdiversity that you should plan on 7-10% CTR for position #1 relative to searches. It can be more or less than that, depending on your search term and what your site is about. We buy our own company's name on overture and get a 40% CTR in the first position. So that's about as good as you'd get (searcher is looking for us, and they find us in #1 spot). I've also seen #1 listings have a lower rate, depending on how relevant the title etc. was.
The overture suggestion tool numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. They are not numbers to rely on for planning purposes. Even the people at Overture can't tell you where they come from.
Good luck to you...
This is across the board on many product lines. This is very unusual. Its like they got caught doing something wrong and are now paying a penalty for it.
Does anybody out there know the real reason in the big drop in ppc prices?
Generally you find advertisers have a finite budget and tend to blow chunks of it at the beginning of the month and then find they have to coast at the end of the month to stay within budget.
It's certainly not a cunning ploy on their part.
The move to lower the min bids was to recruit more people to start new accounts, as most of them have min monthly spends, so if you don't use all your money up, the PPCs still make some cash. And some of those advertisers, will turn into large spenders, once they have an account.
