Who is playing?
Shak
I wonder if your last 1000 impressions did well or something, as if you only have a 1.1%, and tops of 8 people, it seems that your compeition's ads aren't meeting minumum CTR rates. Those statistics don't make any sense when I look at my ads which aren't making premium placements.
As premium placements really do affect advertisers a lot, it seems G should just tell people the guidelines. It's not like showing the secret formula will allow people to manipulate Gs CTR rates any better than without knowing it.
We have been in the premium slot since 11/1/03 for this term, which gets >20,000 impressions per month. Our CTRs for that period have ranged from .8 - 2.4% (monitored daily), and we are always on top.
oh, I forgot to mention, The status column always says "Strong"
-c
It makes me wonder if part of the 'preformance bar' has todo with what your competitors are doing and if you're beating them by x margin.
Overture's performance bar is based on your ctr vs your competitors ctr, estimated out by position. So you can have a word with a 25% ctr with one bar, or one with a 1% ctr with 5 bars based on competition. Wonder if G has introduced something similiar into their formula.
That might explain why we cannot get no-competition KWs (that get 30,000 impressions per month) promoted, even though CTRs are 8% plus for these terms.
-c
Wassup?
Shak has the title of this thread correct (except for the smile) :-(
-c
facing this for two days with one of our niche campaigns. CTR has gone up to 8%. Average click price is moderate though. Could be fun if once in premium position you will stay there due to high CTR performance even if maximum bid is reduced.
Anyhow I am seeing no premium links in some $$ kw-areas. maybe Google is still calculating in these cases who deserves the jump.
Now we pay up to $2.50 a click, but our average is probably a dollar.
One possible explanation is that our premium ads seemed to be broad matched and it wasn't possible to put in -ve keywords.
Anyway, I guess this is win win. I earn more, Google earns less off me, but now I am not hogging the top spot they can sell the clicks I don't want to someone else.
I usually go by the search results themselves but if the snippets (and Titles) are really awful and I can't be bothered visiting then I'll look to the AdWords. And not just the top one either, the one that has the most relevant text for the key phrase I'm searching.
edit: typo
In our case our cost went down about 15% per click but our overall billing has increased substantially,
Which billing do you mean? If your cost went down then your Advertising bill went down too no?
A similar thing happened to us (my post above). We spend less, but sales are higher, so I guess the clicks are more relevant.
It's great now because we can also fill up with customers and when we are near full, we just switch off the advertising. Premium didn't have that flexibility.
Mind you, it is really hard work to filter out all the crap with broad match on. Some of our Ad Groups are 7 pages of -ve keywords for one broad phrase.
