I’ve tried a couple things to raise clicks without raising bid price but they’ve failed – Google seems to circumvent them;
- Running multiple similar ads at the same price, with the same keywords, pointing to the same url doesn’t work. Google seems to just spread the impressions across the multiple ads. I’ve tried this with various mixes of campaigns and ads and it doesn’t seem to work.
- I have read that opening multiple accounts doesn’t work either.
I am perfectly willing to pay a fair price for clicks. What I don’t want is to have to pay the penalty outlined below;
Example; Assume I start with a 5-cent bid on a keyword, which results in a not-top-position that generates 100 clicks per day. Now assume I want to raise my clicks and I bid higher to get a higher position. Let's say I bid 10-cents, and I now get 200 clicks per day. The problem is that for a 2x change in bid I now have a 4x change in total cost. I am paying the 10-cent fee not only on the second, incremental, 100 clicks, but also on the first 100 that I originally was paying 5-cents each for.
[ I ran a scenario with Google's traffic estimator, and the results were actually far worse than that.]
Anyhow, does anyone have a strategy for raising one's position, and receiving more clicks, that avoids this seemingly exponential increase in cost?
Personally, I haven't noticed that much of a difference in clicks from positions 5 through 8 to make an increase in bid worthwhile. Bumping up to position four will get you in the upper group of results for AOL which could be very beneficial. I also haven't seen a lot of difference in positions 1 though 4 unless the top ad is getting bumped north which helps a lot. The way Google displays the ads, I think most people scan through all of them that are displayed.
That said, the most cost effective way to get to the top is to improve your ad. This involves using negatives to help weed out junk impressions that are not likely to yield interested clickers and more importantly interested buyers. Then try to design a good call to action ad that will get the searcher to click on your ad instead of the others. This will increase your CTR and slowly float your ad to the top without increasing your bid.
If your higher bid gives you a higher position, thus raising your CTR rate, in the end your cpc could be lower or the same as when you started. I've seen many clients who actually have a lower CPC for the number 1 position than the person in the 3rd-5th position. And, of course, sometimes they pay higher, monitor your account closely when making such changes to see how you can manipulate the numbers in your favor.
It is quite obvious but let me mention it anyway. Easiest way to get more clicks at the same CPC is to add more keywords. Use the keyword suggestion tool to keep adding 2 or 3 new adgroups every week.
Another way to get more clicks is to optimize the existing adgroups. If you have -
red widgets
red widget
blue widget
blue widgets
in a single adgroup, create a new adgroup for each of these keywords. The ad copy of RED WIDGET adgroup should have RED WIDGET (and not red widgets) in the title. Also, use the keyword suggestion tool to add keywords related to RED WIDGET (for eg - hot red widget, soft red widget etc)
