Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

I've been experiementing with Google Adwords as both a buyer of keywords, and seller of space on my websites. Yes, I've set up websites to test various search engine marketing techniques and see how google adwords works. Been a very interesting experiment!

Relavence matters! Your website has to be relavent to your visitors. Google's adword system is very good at matching ads to your content, so placement for advertisers is excellent.

Now the fun part, there is no assurance that your ad will be clicked on. If the content on my site is more compelling than your ad, the odds you ad is clicked on is greatly reduced. But, if my content sucks, and you ad looks very promising...odds are the vistor will click through to you.

So, its a bit of an advertising game, a cipy writing game, and placement gamble.

From my own site stats, I see I get a 1.2 percent click through rate. I have a lot of very specific content with ample amounts of information..so there is little incentive for someone to click out to another website on a google ad. The impressions my site generates is up there. So on 1,000 impressions, there are not a lot of click throughs.

So, impressions vs PPC? I would say a lot depends on your budget and the quality of the sites you are placed on. Your product has a lot to do with placement as well. If you are selling Used MG car parts, you may find you don;t get a lot of clicks from general car web sites, but, you may get a lot of click throus from MG car affectionato web sites. Then again, if your ad copy sucks, and a competitor has better copy, your click count will suffer. So, impressions VS PPC is something you will have to test. Thankfully, on PPC you can set up a small budget and give it a try, containing your risk and financial exposure.

Here are a few links from my own research.

https://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/005729.html

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/tj/publications/joachims_etal_05a.pdf

https://www.e-consultancy.com/topic/shopping-comparison/

https://www.enquiro.com/eye-tracking-pr.asp

and a long list of links that may prove fruitful reading.

https://www.atlassolutions.com/insights

Good luck!

Darcy Moen
www.customerloyaltynetwork.com

Hi Kligman,

My company has a lot of PPC experience both with Google and Overture (now called Yahoo Search Marketing). I hope these answers help, feel free to contact me offline for more depth.

Q: I am looking for some very good and up to date stats on the click through rates of banners ads and Google/Overture textual ads.

Q: How much better is media ads? What products sell better through online ads? What products/services sell better online then anywhere else?

A: Tough question because it all depends on how well strategized and implemented the offline or online marketing program is. The best solution is a combination of offline and online, if your budget can handle it. Then, over a period of time you can measure what is most effective for you, and this is what is ultimately most important anyway, not what works best for the "others".

Some things are just meant for the Internet: Used stuff (ebay and half.com). Travel. Job searching. Marketing forums. Some aren't: Dog food.

Q: What is the clickthrough rate per 1000 Impressions?

A: Banner ad click-through rates usually measure significantly less than 1. The choice of advertising site, copy, size and position of the banner ad has the most effect on this CTR.

Q:Which is better Pay Per Click or by impressions?

A: PPC CTRs are much higher than banner CTRs. This is why Google and Yahoo are doing so well. Yahoo claims an average CTR of 5%. Google not quite that high. In real-life I see it all over the place from 1% to 25% depending on the keyword/phrase, ad copy and call-to-action. In addition, and probably the biggest difference, PPC impressions and CTR's come from searchers actively "hunting". By contrast banner ads are intrusive.

Q: What is the answer to click fraud? Any suggestions?

A:: Most seasoned PPC users just accept as a cost of doing business like shoplifting and other forms of "shrinkage". The general understanding is that the Google and Yahoo have sophisticated systems in place, at least they tell us they do, to catch this. As this is a big threat to their business model, I tend to believe them. My experience with many customers in many different industries is that day-to-day it doesn't warrant developing any stress over, I would worry more about CTR and conversions with specifically designed landing pages. Control what you can.

Does anyone have a few good resources?

Q:

www.searchenginewatch.com
www.clickz.com
Reports at www.doubleclick.com

Theser are the 3 I try to read as much as possible and there are many more including blogs and groups supported by Google and Yahoo.

Any great consultants that specialize in this?

I know one: www.pepperblue.com, you can find out more about them by clicking on my name above. I can give you some more specific real life stats if you would like.