PPC question about CPC

[matty]

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I've just started to dabble in PPC, and after 2 days i have a CTR of around 5%.

now i've checked out what a "good" CTR should be, and it's apparently in the 4-7% area.

i've also read that when you have some traffic, impressions, clicks etc, and have attained a good CTR, you should reduce your maximum bid.

my question is - if google automatically reduces the ammount you need to pay per click if you have a good CTR, then why bother reducing your max bid? isn't google reducing what you pay for you?

also due to the fact i've only been going for 2 days, and have only had about 1500 impressions, is this going to be too soon to start reducing my bids? does google wait for a larger set of data to analyse before doing you any favours?

[Jon@buyagift]

i've also read that when you have some traffic, impressions, clicks etc, and have attained a good CTR, you should reduce your maximum bid.

Do you know where you read this as not sure that makes sense. You would want to reduce your bids if you were getting a lot of traffic on a term but it was not converting but if it is converting then you would want to keep the bid as it is so as to maintain the position you are in. Chances are by dropping your bid you would drop down the ad positions which is likley to decrease CTR.

As you mentioned if the kw and ad perform well then the actual cpc you pay should start to drop. In my opinion rather than dropping the bid it is better to work on improving the ad and kw quality so that the cpc starts to decrease without having to lower the actual bid i.e. testing out different ad texts, using good quality landing pages etc.

Others may well suggest different though.

Hope that helps a bit.

[Frostie]

Dig deeper into Google, and I am sure the wording is more likely to be "You COULD..." and not "You SHOULD"...

However, I would leave it more than 2 days. Personally I tend to leave it in place for over a month before I start dabbling with prices etc.

[matty]

thanks for the feedback - i can't recall the sites, but 2 or 3 advice pages or forum entries advised dropping the max CPC when you're getting a high CTR.

i'll take your advice and leave it as it is for the moment.

[matty]

another quickie - it's just the google search network i've got good CTR on - on the content network it's about 0.33%, which takes my overall CTR to about 1.9%.

which of these is the most important factor to google, and should i opt out of the content network to maintain a high CTR?

[Jon@buyagift]

another quickie - it's just the google search network i've got good CTR on - on the content network it's about 0.33%, which takes my overall CTR to about 1.9%.

which of these is the most important factor to google, and should i opt out of the content network to maintain a high CTR?

Hi again,

The content network CTR will not affect the quality score of the search network - in other words the content network CTR wont have an impact on how google determines how much your cpc will be for the search network.

Whether you use the Content network or not really depends on whether it converts for you or not (this may well depend on the industry you are in and sometimes the time of year). If it converts well then it is worth while using.

IF it converts badly then there are several options you can try to improve results before switching it off completely.

1. if you use the option to bid seperately for search and content then you can obvioulsy drop bids or increase them depending on how they are converting.

2. you can look through you logfiles to see where the content clicks are coming from - you can then use the site exclusion tool to stop your ads appearing on any sites you dont feel are bringing you good quality traffic.

3. you can create a seperate campaign which shows on the search network only, you can then move any ad groups that do not convert on the content network into this ad group so that only the ones that convert will be shown.
hope that helps

regards

[matty]

thanks a lot for the info Jon - it's very helpful!

[Jon@buyagift]

No worries, good luck with the site