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I wonder how long it will be until he catches on. Even when he does, I got it checking the bids once every minute, and now we get 20 bid changes/day (right?) ....so I don't think he'll bother making 20 x 10 search terms = 200 changes per day to keep up with me. Hehehe....
I'm kinda glad we got the overture auto-bid, combined with a third party auto-bid software, making my bids in a sense auto-auto-bid, it makes for interesting strategies to bankrupt your competition before they even catch on. ;) Hopefully you can get them to drop out altogether or drop their bids rather than participate in rediculuous bid wars.
Many people have the mentality that every click is a customer. In reality the industry average is only 1.8 clicks of every 100 is a customer.
This company has most likely set its bid at #1, and it will stay there until, they blow their budget, and may never check their listing again until they run out of funds.
By placing your bid at 99 cents, you are risking that some idiot will bid $1.01, using the going with the herd (over the cliff) mentality.
Are you referring to a specific industry?
Can you tell us your source?
I have heard that highly branded sites such as Amazon.com does better, in the 5 - 7% Conversion rate. Can't remember the source for this however.
My traffic for that client converts at approximately 6%. So much less traffic, but conversion is great. Add the traffic together, and the CR is still rather dismal.
I would avoid using any CR info for anything other than comparison of campaigns- on a per product/keyphrase basis. There are just too many variables to be meaningful. And even an industry-wide examination cannot possibly extract and refine all the variables.
For example, do ALL of Amazon's book choices convert at the same rates? Or are there higher CR's for more specific topics? Or are CR's based on the reviews provided - or nice cover shots? Or the rarity of the book, or do searches for NYT bestsellers convert better than searches for topical reference books?
There's got to be a huge amount of data crunching to make any useful sense of CR data.
PS brn2drv, If you are not careful, that $1 bidder could drop his bid to .98 and guess who gets the shaft then? This tactic used to be called "kneecapping" but now OV makes it easy.
What I think is really funny is when someone bids huge words, and when you go to their site it looks like a Monkey created it. Yeah buddy! watch the conversion fly with that 12 dollar keyword and an unprofessional site... but hey, at least your above your competition.
Why don't you try to make money and not just ruin somebody else campaign.
Buisness like the jungle, is survival of the fittest. Do something stupid and expect to get eaten.
Like I said, I am happy Overture made this move. Before the strategy with the bidding wars was that you had to keep outbidding your competitor as quickly as possible, and everyone was trying to pay a penny more than everyone else, and everyone ended up paying a higher click rate. Now you can more or less "force" your competitor to lower their max bid, or pay a penalty.
I just don't understand and if he wants to show everybody about the autobidding, hey great he can do without ruining this guy's business.
But then again maybe it's just me and I don't see it.
I know there is little difference between #1 and #2, but for $0.05 vs $0.06 or $0.07 for traffic I'm willing to pay $0.30+ for, I'd rather be #1.
When you say #4 gets you good traffic, is it close to #3? I would think it was a lot less? Or are you saying #4 is as "good" as #3 when you factor in ROI?
However, there is a significant droppoff in total clicks from #3 to #4. But the lower traffic is offset a good bit by the fact that positions 4 and 5 have much better conversions. My assumption is that this searcher who is down at the bottom of the page (actually the 24th and 25th lisiting) is a very serious customer.
So right now I aim for #2 or #3 unless the cost is too rich for my budget. Then I prefer #5.
As far as ranking goes, in my experience 1 & 2 do the best, of course but 3 is still pretty good and you aren't hurt by too much at 4 when you consider that you will still get orders and you are paying less for what should be the more serious customers. If they get to 4 and click they are price shopping and not just curious. I try to keep it at 4 or more but I may try 5 now that I have read this string.
We manage a site for a car hire company whose purpose it to get people to book their holiday car hire - payment up front.
Overall the #bookings/#visitors ~ 2.7%
This is real visitors and excludes robots, our own and the client's access.
On OvertureUK, if we are within the top3 listings the client receives ~10-20% of the estimated traffic (Search Term Suggestion Tool)
HTH.
