Sometimes, especially for high ticket items there don't seem to be any real patterns for picking out the real "money" keywords so "optimization" is somewhat of a shot in the dark.
The solution so far has been to reduce bid prices, have lower rankings in the ad listings, and get more traffic and better ROI for the same ad spend.
A similar strategy is being tested on Overture. With ads up top and on the side on Yahoo! & MSN, why pay to be in the top-3 listings? Traffic stays about the same while CPC goes down and ROI goes up.
Anyone else finding it more beneficial to be lower in the rankings, not just due to lower bid prices but for higher conversion rates and better ROI as well?
If everyone now starts shooting for those spots we'll all pay a lot less than we do now :)
For some companies, the sheer volume that the first couple of positions receives more than pays for the top spot, lower ROI, but more total visitors takes care of that.
I'm still holding my tongue on G until after I see the numbers for at least a week with the new format.
I used to jump back and forth on this ... Sometimes I would put all of my keywords to the top position and keep them there for a while. Other times, I'll scale back and let them ride lower on the page.
What I found was that when the ads were lower, I was spending less and getting fewer visitors, but a higher percentage turned into sales. When the ads were higher, I was spending more money, getting more visitors, and MORE sales, but a lesser PERCENTAGE of buyers than with the low position.
For me, the percentage didn't matter, how many actual sales I get is what matters. I spend 10k - 12k a month on AdWords and another 7k - 8k on Overture to stay on top, but my average sale is around $2,500. Paying a couple of dollars a click doesn't really matter.
If I were selling less expensive items though, or items that were'nt hot sellers and purchased all the time like what I'm selling now, I would probably want to stay lower and think about ROI. So that's why I say it depends on what you're selling, specifically how much it costs.
I love #2 or #3. Lower than that I find the traffic falls off too much.
The #1 spot draws too much casual traffic.
Pretty much everyone here covered it... #1 position is great to brand yourself, but people like a bargain and they're going to shopped around.
There are some statistics for YP advertising. Now there are of course some differences between YP & SEM, but I think people assume there is more comparision shopping than is actually done.
These are quoted from this page [myprofessionaladvertising.com], however, I've seen these same stats on multiple occasions.
1. 42% of people will contact two or more businesses (meaning 58% of people do not contact more than 1 business) - how good are your landing pages/conversion rates - this is a very imporntant point).
2. 81% of phone book users will make contact with an advertiser.
3. 34% will contact a company they had never contacted before
4. 81% of consumers start at the beginning of the heading when they do not have a business name in mind.
When you consider people start at the top, and many people don't go to a second site if they like the first one, the top few listings can make quite a difference in sales IF you KWs are highly targeted, and you're also not coming up for a lot of info searches where the person doesn't want to spend money - but just learn.
Market demand per day has more impact than bid amount, IMHO.
We have reduced our Adwords spend way down.
Overture's interface for advertisers is so poor compared to Google, that we have stopped the OV account altogether.
Regards,
Craigster
we are now getting ripped.
Traffic fall off has been minor, and conversion rate seems the same or maybe better.
I still have my 'golden' keywords that I won't let fall out of top spot - but for everything else cheaper seems better (at least for me).
