Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Hi Mike,

There is no industry standard for either, however for a CTR benchmark I like to see CTRs no less than 3.0 and see them as high as 25% depending on the industry, keyword, Max CPC, time of year, time of day, day of the week, ad content, title etc.

Conversion rates are completely dependent on what your offer and/or call-to-action on your landing page is - any such claim to an industry standard would be completely irrelevant.

I would if at all possible avoid landing searchers on your home page unless your campaign is extremely general which is going to give you a very low conversion, as rbauman mentions, developing specific landing pages to match the relevancy of your keywords, ad title and call-to-action content are the key to PPC optimization,

What I would focus on is setting initial internal benchmarks and establishing a strategy to improve on this, in every campaign, over a realistic period of time like 90 days.

Hi Mike,

There is no industry standard for either, however for a CTR benchmark I like to see CTRs no less than 3.0 and see them as high as 25% depending on the industry, keyword, Max CPC, time of year, time of day, day of the week, ad content, title etc.

Conversion rates are completely dependent on what your offer and/or call-to-action on your landing page is - any such claim to an industry standard would be completely irrelevant.

I would if at all possible avoid landing searchers on your home page unless your campaign is extremely general which is going to give you a very low conversion, as rbauman mentions, developing specific landing pages to match the relevancy of your keywords, ad title and call-to-action content are the key to PPC optimization,

What I would focus on is setting initial internal benchmarks and establishing a strategy to improve on this, in every campaign, over a realistic period, depending on the depth of your PPC program and your time and ability to manage and optimize it like 60 - 90 days.

Mike,

Check out DoubleClicks latest trend report:

https://www.doubleclick.com/us/knowledge_central/trend_reports/search/

I agree with Tim, there are no 'industry standard' conversion rates, there are rates that get used, but usually to prove a particular viewpoin (I know I have used them!).

When you ask about Google, I presume you mean AdWords! I have had CTR into double figures whilst colleagues of mine with similar campaigns get single figure CTRs.

It basically depends on the keywords you use :-)

Hi Mike -

Conversion rates depend a lot on the category and price point range. Many of the heavily-promoted, big-name sites with low-range price points convert at 6-11%.

But conversion rates are just an indicator. The real question is whether you can generate traffic for less than the profit you make - if yes, you're winning the battle.

However, I'd like to point out something that is likely causing your conversion rates to be very low. I suspect that if you look at your Web site's statistics, you will find that a huge percentage of your visitors bounce off of the very first page they visit. In other words, if you're sending traffic to your homepage, I'd bet that the majority of them go no further than the home page. (To see this, compare your "entry pages" and "exit pages" reports.)

Here's why I believe this is happening - the pages on your site are huge. The homepage is over 800K in graphics and code. Visitors will only wait for a few seconds (particularly visitors from an Adwords ad), and your pages will take over two minutes to load.

When it comes to conversion rates, slow load times are deadly. You'll enhance your conversion rates tremendously by optimizing your Web pages to load more quickly.

Hope it helps.

Rafe VanDenBerg