Now Every single time this has happened, advertisers have made positive comments about Premium Listings. outperforming Adwords by quite some distance.
What I can NOT understand is why more people do NOT use Premium Listings instead, I know there are a number of reasons, such as:
High Entry Cost
NO inventory available
CPM rates are very high (when doing CPC analysis)
but the most common one:
Lack of Contact from Google in this department!
(GoogleGuy u reading closely).
Now from my personal experience, I have NO problems with ANY of the above, especially the NO contact bit.
If push came to shove, I would phone Head of UK sales on her home number at 3am to spend some money, and I am sure she would not complain, this is the attitude I see at Google UK...Customer Service...Customer Service...
So either there is a problem in the USA, or better contact channels are required by Google in relation to Premium Listings.
The reason I am making this posting is for fellow members to realise that Google Premium Listings is a very good marketing tool, "often" cheaper than Adwords as NO bidding wars are being played.
Shak
=====================================
latest campaign stats across Europe on Premium Listings:
Impressions: 71,943
Clicks: 9,637
CTR: 13,40
The highest creative achieved: 20.04 CTR
The lowest creative achieved: 7.27 CTR
(the above are based on creatives with at least 2,000 impressions), there are other niche keywords with a few hundrded impressions achieving up to 100% CTR.
======================================
I am pretty sure its different for USA and UK.
Furthermore I am also confident that if the minimum was $15,000 for 3 months, but you ONLY had $10,000 to spend, that they world NOT turn you away.
My opinion is that an entry figure was set to discourage timewasters wishing to spend $50 , especially considering the admin time taken to get a camapign up and running.
At the end of the day, if Google have inventory and YOU are a serious advertiser, I am 100% sure they will NOT turn you down.
Shak
Not necessarily
It could also imply..
* Google using space that is unfilled - making them more revenue as CTR is higher. In that way it could just as easily imply the failure of premium listings model in some way..
* Google trying to convert their adwords advertisers (who provide much less revenue per advertiser) on the advantages of have a premium spot, therby converting small advertisers to big ones (to some extent this thread itself could very well be a manifestation of that strategy)
Premium spots are only sensible, cost effective (and affordable) for certain types of advertisers, while Adwords are more cost effective and affordable for other types. I think a lot depends on industry, click volume required, and scale of the advertisers business. Thre are a lot of webmasters advertising in Adwords, who would otherwise never advertise on the net, as the entry cost is low. The ROI for Google to manage and recruit this large group vs advertiser expenditure must be much lower, but some will be converted..
teeceo.
Now if there was enough inventory, I would join soonest.
By the way, which country is served ad-wise, when searching in www2?
I see different ads on ww2 compared to www.
Regarding minimum spends, the minimum for the Google UK office is £3k, but yes, for special cases we can accept lower spends - espceially if the campaign is simple to post/manage etc...
teeceo.
at last an answer many have been waiting for!
GoogleGuy, can we put Kate through the initiation ceremony at WebmasterWorld, or do you have other plans.
And since Kate (morgana)is based in the UK, Google Girl would be better as we do NOT really use terms such as Gal.
choice is yours, initiation ceremony awaits :)
Shak
I think GoogleGirl would be much more fitting, too many folks around here are already looking for an evil witch to blame for their SE positions;)
appx 1 month results for adwords:
spent on advertising : $600
sales : $2200
profit: $1600
appx 1 week results for premium (money spent is actually
spent to move adword to premium position, not purchase of
premium pos)
spent on advertising : $1500
sales : $1500
profit: $0
CTR doubled, click cost went from 0.08 to 0.25, but
conversion was *much* lower. My ad is very targeted
(type first 7 chars of my user name in google search to see)
Bye, bye premium listings!
What were your 1st week results?
interesting finding ... can you be more precise by how much your conversion rate dropped? Using the approx figures you gave, your sales per week seemed to treble while your CTR only doubled, so your conversion actually appears to increase!
Anyway, I guess one thing is to see if you can reduce that $0.25 CPC. 2 things:
1) Were you the #1 Adwords guy before? If you weren't, then the results you're seeing will partly reflect the move to #1, not only to premium.
2) But assuming you were already #1 on a particular keyword, there is one way to get premium without paying any more CPC. That's to use [] exact matches. The thing that can really drive up the CPC in unpredictable ways is other keywords mixed in.
Say you want to have a Adword ad on your favourite keyword "algebra", and you're already #1 (more accurately, you're position 1 on [algebra] alone, and e.g. position 1.3 on average for all searches containing "algebra"). Maybe you're bidding $.15 and paying an average of $.08 a click. You find by experimenting that you "go north" to a premium slot if you raise your bid to $.60. Now if you up your bid for "algebra" to $.60 you find your average CPC jumps to maybe $.25, like yours did. What's causing this is searchers who are typing in searches like "algebra software", "algebra calculator" or even "algebra sex toy";). With these searches you're competing against high-bidders who are bidding on the generic terms "calculator", "software" or "sex toy". It's when your ad gets clicked on amidst all these other searches that your CPC is much higher than it is on your usual searches like "algebra" or "algebra help" or "algebra homework".
What's the solution? Use exact matches like [algebra]. With an exact match, if you're in position #1 then you can raise your bid and not have to pay any more than usual; you're already on top and so paying only a cent more than they guy in position #2. But by raising your bid you get elevated to premium. the only think to watch out for is the competition in position #2 raising their bid!:o
e.g. [blue widget]
#ord sales ctr clicks conv. clk total cost
62 2480 2.80% 7747 0.8% $0.08 $619
30 1200 6.00% 5542 0.54% $0.24 $1330
To answer your question - I was not 1st on algebra kwd.
My avg position was 2. My max was set at 0.15, but on
average the cost was 0.08
So, yes - this is probably due to moving to 1st position.
- previous #1 must have set their max to 0.23 and I had to
beat that.
As far as using [algebra], I don't think it would help,
because I have weeded out unwanted "algebra xxx" combination
via negative keywords. I am constantly checking my logs to
see if there are any wierd keyword combinations that were
used to reach me and I haven't seen any for a while.
NFFC suggested I wait for a while, but even if conversion
rate increases some, high click cost still seems to make it
less profitable then my original setup.
Also, I probably need to start focusing on improving my
conversion rate in general - I think I should be able to
do better than 0.8%.
I threw it in a spreadsheet, and looking at it I think your first conclusion is right: there's no way the higher CTR is worth it at treble the price.
With the current CTRs you'd need to treble the page's conversion rate to make the more money from the higher option than the lower.
Even if you prequalified your ads more, causing CTR to drop while raising conversion, it's still doubtful if it would work. If by prequalifying more you halved the CTR, you'd still need to more than double conversion rates to find the expensive way was more profitable per week.
Good luck raising conversion rates anyway - someting I need to turn my attention to.
