Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Cost Of Pay Per Click For It Search Terms

Posted by Anonymous on 6/6/2006 at 10:30 PM ET 500 Points
We are a network security and IT services firm. We have been using Google PPC campaigns and have been getting lots of impressions of our ads (about 1,000 - 1,500 per month). We are seeing fairly low clock through rates, in the order of 5-10 per month, and these are typically in the $7.00 - $13.00 range on terms such as "network security".

We are targeting only states where we do business in our campaign.

My question is, are these click through rates (about 0.1%-0.2%) and prices per term typically in the IT industry? We have done some experimenting with terms and ads, but have only made marginal progress to date in improving the numbers. I am also surprised we do not see more people clicking through on other terms (a total of about 60 terms across three campaigns).

Note for the most part we are getting decent position in the listings, typically about 2-7 place.

I would be interested in and comments from others on experiences in IT PPC campaigns, and any suggestions on what we should try.

Thanks!

Steve
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Pepper Blue on 6/6/2006 at 10:49 PM Accepted
    Steve,

    First, have you used the tools supplied by Google that tell you what your expected CTR and average CPC for your position should be?

    If not, do so as this will give you a reasonable idea of what to expect.

    If you have and these are inconsistent with what you are actually seeing then the problems most likely are in your calls-to-action or lack thereof, or the lack of relevancy between keywords being searched (what you call "terms"), and your ad headlines and descriptions in the ads themselves.

    This process of optimization is constant an ongoing - make those calls-to-action strong and deliver on them with specific landing pages.

    Also, typically, the more general the keywords the higher the CPC will be and the lower the CTR will be.

    Now with that being said, if it makes you feel better I do have IT accounts and some of their CTRs are not great, despite our best attempts to make them more exciting and relevant.

    For example, with one, we have a campaign that has a CTR average of .85%

    By contrast I have non IT accounts that consistently have CTRs at +-15%

    You also might want to break those three campaigns up into more specific ones based on "themes" and use those keywords/phrases directly in the titles and descriptions.

    Lastly, make sure you are not counting the CTR of any campaigns running on the Google content network as those are always low and will really skew your results.

    I hope that helps.
  • Posted on 6/7/2006 at 4:25 AM Member
    You have to be more specific, concentrate as Pepper Blue has said on one theme, sometimes too many ideas might be confusing and you easily can get any information about CTR on google GO check, and good luck !
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