Recommended price per click

[freshpurple]

How "fixed" is this?

I mean - when you do a search for your keywords and Google gives you the "Average price per click" for them, can you significantly underbid this and still have your advert appear? (And where will it appear?)

Just asking because, the price for some of the keywords we were considering would require us to have a conversion rate of around 10% to break even! I know that probably means we need to be a bit more creative in looking for less competitive niches, but even most of those are pretty expensive.

[LandingNet]

If you're going to need a 10% conversion rate for the price, then unless you're currently getting a much better conversion rate than 10%, either long-tail the keyword or reduce the cost of the keyword.

As long as the price you pay keeps you higher than result 11 you're still going to appear on the first page. From experience, position 3-5 converts best

[carlosmessi]

I suggest you start with a low bid of 50% of the proposed bid and raise it gradually. Usually I start at .25.

[LOS Design UK]

Originally Posted by freshpurple

How "fixed" is this?

I mean - when you do a search for your keywords and Google gives you the "Average price per click" for them, can you significantly underbid this and still have your advert appear? (And where will it appear?)

Just asking because, the price for some of the keywords we were considering would require us to have a conversion rate of around 10% to break even! I know that probably means we need to be a bit more creative in looking for less competitive niches, but even most of those are pretty expensive.

First place to start IMHO is your margin. Look at what it is then move forward from there.

[Paul Norman]

It is not fixed. Price per click fluctuates at different times of the day, and depends on a number of factors including the quality of your advert, its relevance to both the search term and your landing page. Getting the relevance score high means you can get a place higher for less.

10% conversion rate would be high, although it does depend on what you are bidding for and selling.

[Mike Seddon]

You can just ignore Google's average price. It's an average and because of that it's wildly inaccurate.

My suggestion is that you build your campaigns around what you are prepared to pay for a conversion and make some guess about what the conversion rate would be.

Maybe you already have an idea about conversion rates based on current traffic to the website so use that if you do.

As mentioned already you can lower your bid rate by working on the Quality score of your keywords.

I would also look at how you can improve the conversion rates to a sale. That's what usually gets overlooked. People tend to home in on reducing click price whereas adding 1% to your conversion rate can have a more dramatic impact to your bottom line and also on what you can afford to pay per click.

Cheers
Mike

[Hevs]

I have been doing pay per click for a couple of years now and the cost per click seem to be all over the place. However on an ever increasing slope!!

it is still in my opinion the best and quickest way to get seen but boy is it getting expensive.

I have found the cost per click that google give is not anywhere near what it actually costs.

I am trying desprately to get natural search engine seo done to save all these crazy prices.

[PBScott]

I am still a bit of a noob at this, but from what I have read this is what I understand.

Dont let Google calculate your cost per clcik, use their estimating tool and then divide thier estimate in halve and start at that bid.

Check back in a couple of days to see what position your Ads are in, I prefer the 3-4 position personaly.

If you cant afford to get it into an above 4 average placement on a reasonable budget, then you should drop the keyword and get another one.

[freshpurple]

Thanks for all the advice everyone!

We'll definitely be trying to optimise our website and conversion rates before splashing out on any advertising, but very useful to know how to bid for adwords.

If you're going to need a 10% conversion rate for the price, then unless you're currently getting a much better conversion rate than 10%, either long-tail the keyword or reduce the cost of the keyword.

With regards to long-tail - I understand the concept, but would have though it was more applicable to on-page content for SEO, rather than adwords. Am I missing something?

[Alexis]

freshpurple,

If I got it right, the advantage with long tail is that you have much less competition, hence a very low price. Someone said on this forum that we should have thousands of long tails keywords instead of dozens of short one to improve ROI.