Posts Tagged conversion rate
4 Practical Ways to Lower Your AdWords CPCs
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on July 27th, 2011
WordStream last week carried out some fascinating research on Google AdWords CPC prices of different sectors. One key finding was that the finance industry carried high CPCs of up to $54.91, while other service-related sectors such as education, law and health also exhibited expensive CPC prices of over $30.00.
It’s All Relative
Since CPC prices are often closely linked to the potential profitability of a sale from that keyword, the CPC price is often a mute point. A ‘bad credit history remortgage’ could be worth $15,000 profit to a remortgage broker, so having CPCs in excess of $50.00 can deliver a strong return on investment.
On the other hand, the keyword ‘New York weather’ has little commercial intention, so keywords such as this tend to benefit from low CPCs.
While this relativity of CPC prices makes CPC comparisons across sectors rather meaningless, most PPC advertisers would jump at the chance to pay lower CPCs. So below are 4 strategies I’ve found useful for achieving lower CPCs, while still maintaining a strong conversion rate.
Source: Wordstream
How to Strike Gold in Google’s Search Query Report
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on March 31st, 2011
Google’s search query reports provide PPC advertisers with two fantastic opportunities to improve the performance of their AdWords campaigns:
- Identify irrelevant keywords which can be added as negatives
- Identify new keyword opportunities for keyword expansion
The difficulty, however, is efficiently and reliably pulling out trends and insights from a raw search query report. According to Google, 25% of searches made each day are completely unique, and 70% of searches lie outside of Google’s Keyword Tool. While this suggests that the large majority of your search queries will have received only a handful of clicks (making trend-spotting extremely difficult), it also presents a great opportunity for identifying new keywords outside of the Keyword Tool.
This article will explore the techniques which can be used not only to identify negative keywords from a search query report, but also identify new opportunities for practical keyword expansion.
3 Steps to Mid-Tail PPC Profitability
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on November 5th, 2010
The beauty of pay per click marketing is that it allows you to choose keywords which are highly relevant to your business. By only showing ads for search terms which closely match the products and services your business offers, you can ensure a high degree of relevancy and strong return on investment from paid search.
PPC advertisers have abided by this relevant approach since the dawn of PPC, knowing that to maximize PPC profitability, ads should be shown for highly-relevant keywords, and not for irrelevant keywords. If you are a synthetic grass manufacturer, for example, you should only show ads for highly-relevant searches such as ‘artificial grass’ and ‘synthetic grass suppliers’, but not for less relevant searches such as ‘real grass’ or ‘buy grass seed online’. Showing ads for these less relevant keywords would achieve a low conversion rate and yield a poor profit.
Or so the theory goes.
But maybe there is a way to still achieve great results from these less relevant keywords? Maybe there is a way to reach a greater number of potential customers, while still achieving a strong profitability?
There is. But it involves a different way of thinking. It involves a different approach to simply bidding on a range of keywords, showing your best performing ads, and waiting for the sales to come flooding in.
Intelligent Analytics for Intelligent AdWords Management
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on September 15th, 2009
All too often keywords in a paid search account are evaluated based solely on their ability to generate conversions: leads, bookings or sales. If a keyword has an unacceptable conversion rate or an unsatisfactory return on investment (ROI), it is paused or its bid is greatly reduced.
Sometimes, if conversion data is scarce, click-through-rate (CTR) is instead used to evaluate a keyword’s performance. If a keyword generates only 5 clicks from 1,000 impressions, it has a CTR of 0.5% so is deemed irrelevant. The keyword is then paused or relegated to the second page of search result obscurity.
This is not the right approach. Read the rest of this entry »
The 5 Benefits of Long-Tail Keywords
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on August 6th, 2009
There’s been a lot of talk about long-tail keywords in pay per click (PPC). You could say it started in the entertainment industry with Chris Anderson’s influential Long Tail article in 2004, but it wasn’t long before the concept became mainstream among search marketers.
Long-tail keywords are those low-volume, obscure, infrequently searched-for keywords that turn up in your search query reports. ‘Cheap remortgage for bad credit history’ is one example of a long-tail keyword. ‘Remortgages’ is not.
The theory goes like this:
- Long-tail keywords, en masse, can provide significant search volume (high impressions)
- Long-tail keywords have less competition than generic keywords (lower cost per click (CPC), higher click-through rate (CTR))
- Long-tail keywords are more specific than generic keywords, so ads can be better tailored to match the searcher’s needs (higher CTR, higher Quality Score, less wastage from irrelevant searches)
- People making long-tail searches are often further along in the buying cycle and more willing to buy than people making generic searches (higher conversion rate)
- These lower CPCs, higher CTRs and higher conversion rates mean long-tail keywords can be extremely profitable (lower cost per acquisition (CPA))
So are long-tail keywords all they are cracked up to be? Are they worth all the time, effort and commitment they require?
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