Good CTR on Adwords, even from back water pages

You can still get good CTR without paying alot

[lgn]

I decided to bid the 5 cent minimun on a very hot
adword, where somepeople are paying outrageous prices.

In my Industry, CTR tops out at around 5% on well written adwords. Well with my 5 cent bid I earned a position of 35. I expected to get almost zero response, however my CTR is 1.0%

That means that 20% of the people are searching
at least 5 pages deep to find what they want.
This is unheard of in any other search engine.

Im very happy with this as it is costing me very little for a hot word.

Lets do the math

Top adword position. Cost 60 cents.

60 cents x 1000 Impressions x 5% CTR = $30.00
5 cents x 1000 Impressions x 1% CTR = $0.50

The competitor is paying 60 times more to get 5 times the traffic.

As you can see, bidding to be the top adwords player, is an incredible waste of money.

[chris_f]

Hi lgn,

Thanks for the information and the sharing of your experience. I'm glad to hear it has worked out for you. However, I have to put a spanner in your works here. It is not necessarily a waste of time coming #1 in you adwords campaign. I have got a couple of sites in very competitive sectors and if I even drop to #2 my CTR hits zero.

Chris

[TomWaits]

For our most competitive terms, if we dip to #3 or below, our CTR is pretty sickly. I've found that #1 or #2 are interchangeable.

For the rest, I follow lgn's methods. No more than $0.06 a click. Those pennies add up and I'm sure Mr. Schmidt already drives a nice car.

[andrewg]

lgn, unless you know for sure those clicks are converting, you could be wasting money even at .05.

But by and large you are definitely onto something.

[adamas]

I'm not sure the impression numbers would work like that though.

Would you not be getting far fewer impressions on page 5 than page 1?

But not worrying about first page looks like a good idea if you have a set budget.

[lgn]

Im not sure if google determines the CTR based on the total number of searches for a keyword or
by the total number of impressions for your ad.

If the case is the latter, then yes this would invalidate my calculations for anything beyond
page 1.

One thing I have noticed, is that you get your
bigest position jump for 1 cent increments, going
from paying 5 cents to paying 6 cents.

It appears that there are alot of advertisers paying the flat minimun, and by boosting to 6 cents, you are getting ahead of alot of them.

[TomWaits]

We always bid at least $0.06 because of that. Most advertisers just put in the minimum.

[Sarah Atkinson]

jee .06 cents maybe I'm doing something wrong... I'm paying over a doller on some words
and getting 5% CTR top
mostly its hovering in the 1% range average is 1.4%

[skibum]

On hot keywords you can do really well with low bids even if your ad rank is in the high 20's/low 30's. CTR has got to be base on impressions of your ad rather that total searches.

Heck, I'd rather have the #9 spot (top of the second page) at an (often) much lower bid than 5 though 8 on the first page.

[lgn]

Top spot of second page?. That must be hard to manage. Which leads to the question, is their any
google adwords management software out their, like there is with overture?.

Im not sure how Google would react if there was.
Overture eventually reached a deal with the bid management software companies (ie no more than 1 auto bid change per hour).

My guess is that Google, would just say no, and banish whoever would try to use it, as they do with the main index monitoring software.

Anyways, with Googles adword interface, it would be one heck of a program to write.

[skibum]

Seems like it might be to Google's advantage to make setting up and managing AdWords campaigns easier. Once they get rid of premium sponsorships and everything is AdWords bigger advertisers may demand a system that is easier to work with.