AdWords Clickthrough Rate

[misch.chief]

Hi,

I was wondering what peoples views were on Clickthrough rate were. I thought if you had a high CTR on keywords then you would get cheaper bids for that keyword, meaning over time you can reduce your bid on these words to end up in the same position for cheaper?!

However, I haven't seen any evidence of this and I find it a better ROI if I have limited budget to pay less for clicks and get a worse CTR, but ge more clicks for my money.

What are your views?

Misch

[gabs]

You need to test thing..

I remeber a study that showed ranking 2/3 on PPC gave the highest ROI ..

Many reasons why no1 isn't always best like a "real" buyer would look at more than 1 site..Thus paying less returns a higher ROI ..

The landing page is really important..

Test test and test some more :D

[misch.chief]

That's not quite what I'm asking; I can get the best CTR at positions 2.5 --> 4.5 for most market sectors, excluding specific and niche keywords.

What I heard is that the higher the CTR the cheaper Google will give you clicks for? Is this true?

Thanks Gabs

[gabs]

The higher the CTR the higher your ad score thus you can drop the ppc price yourself..

Thus making it cheaper... So yes but its best it you change the price and not rely on google ...

[misch.chief]

Thanks for that - I did think that was the case. However I have found even by doing this (dropping bids on high ad scores) I still make more money having lower bids at worse places and having worse CTR, but get more clicks as its cheaper.

Can anyone back me up on that side of things or give their own findings.

Misch

[samg]

For really competitive keywords I have also found that it can take time for your CPC to lower, so I generally give it a nudge by lowering my Max CPC bit by bit but trying to maintain a high position.

Quality Score is also made up of landing page relevancy. If you can maintain good CTRs – great - but also try to improve optimise your landing page to be as relevant to your targeted keyword as possible (even if your QS is GREAT, you can still improve it). Remember, the higher the Quality Score the lower the CPC.

[gabs]

One great tip I've always used and google reccomends ( at adword uni which i've been to a few of in the last few year) is too start high..

Start higher than you want .. This allows google to display your ad a lot more then it will give it a better score than working from low to high..

[misch.chief]

Cheers for that

[Kaya]

I've found that genuine buyers will read down a page and so having an ad lower down at a lower cost will improve ROI even if its does hurt CTR. I think the value Google places on CTR is slightly flawed. You can have the worst unrelated ad, but if you have the budget to have it and number one it will still generate a high number of clicks and have a high CTR. There are a lot of users out there who clock on the first thing they see.

[Thomas Schulz]

However, I haven't seen any evidence of this and I find it a better ROI if I have limited budget to pay less for clicks and get a worse CTR, but ge more clicks for my money.

Over the long run though, your CTR may drop so much more and more keywords get bid price raised outside your new lower bid-price. I have experienced that happen... So bidding much too little over long time can make your adgroup/campaign suffer a little.

[misch.chief]

Ahh, that is a good point - out of interest, what dioes everybody think is a low CTR? For what Thomas is describing I would think that perhaps 1.5% and below is too low.

I would also think that 5-10%+ is a healthy CTR.