Goals in Click-Through Rate

[randfish]

#1
What do you shoot for in Click-Through Rate?

At what point do you consider an ad successful - 5%, 7%, 10%? When is the time to stop tweaking to try to achieve better performance?


#2
When do you consider an ad fully tested?

How many times would you like to see it served before deciding that the conversion rate is probably a good measure of long-term effects? 100 views? 1,000? 5,000?

Thanks for your advice and help.

[GOTseo]

what indsutry?

Is your performance soley based on ctr? or are you adding in conversions also?

[Mel66]

I don't give a hoot about CTR as long as it meets the engine's minimums, which is way more of a concern in Google than in Overture. I'm looking for conversions at an acceptable cost. CTR will also vary widely depending on whether you're doing content targeting or not.

That said, if I'm testing creatives, and I've got 2 ads that pull the same conversion, I'd of course want to run the one that gets a higher CTR. But there's no magic number I'm looking for.

As far as when is it fully tested, we like to get 50-100 orders per cell. Again, views, clicks, etc. are meaningless. You do want to make sure the views are relatively equal in each cell, though.

My $0.02.

Melissa

[FeldBum]

#1: It depends. I won't say that CTR doesn't matter: you need to keep above the engine minimums and in Google, good CTR can give you a great boost that will keep your CPC low. Other than that, you should be concerned about conversions and the hell with CTR.

Branded terms, misspellings and competitor keywords will all have high CTRs, many above 25%. Generic keywords will have lower CTRs.

Branded v. Generic Case Study (http://kevinlee.net/clickz/westin.htm) and Article (http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/strat/article.php/3387751)

#2: I like to test for a period of time, like a full week, to see how and when keyword perform. Even at 1000 impressions, you should get a pretty good picture.

[Alarr]

#1
What do you shoot for in Click-Through Rate?

At what point do you consider an ad successful - 5%, 7%, 10%? When is the time to stop tweaking to try to achieve better performance?




I usually begin with the end in mind when determining an acceptable CTR.

1) Determin the objective (sale/ lead etc)
2) What is the value of that objective. In this example, I'll use lead.

If a company has 200 customers with a revenue of $2m per year, the average value of a client (simple scenario) is $10k per year.

Cost per sale:
with an average client value of $10k per year, you may determine that an acceptable (and profitiable cost per sale) is $1000.

Cost per lead:
Examining the performance of your sales reps, you may determine that their closing ratio is 10 percent (for every ten leads they close one). If the cost per sale is $1,000 and the closing ratio is 10 percent, you can budget a cost per lead of $100.

3) Once we determine your target cost-per-lead ($100) we can think of the PPC campaign.

4) If your Web site converts 5 percent of traffic to a lead, we can assume we need 200 visitors to acquire 10 leads. Thus, your budget would be $1,000 for $200 clicks (1000/ 200 = $5.00 CPC)

5) If the sum of all your keywords you are advertising with in a given month is 2,000, you would need a clickthrough ratio of 10 percent.

Again, this is a simple scenario. But once we have the model, we can make adjustments.

*If we find our clickthrough rate is less (say 5 percent) we need to find an additional 2,000 impressions to be exposed to.

This is a simple world example but the model is pretty much the same.

I hope this helps!

-Alarr

[jewboy]

Feldbum, good to run into you here on the forums. Hope you had a good time in New Orleans :)

In my industry - apartment rentals and real estate sales, measuring conversions and ROI is an almost impossible task.

Thus the best metric we rely on is our CTR. What is a good CTR? Well, it depends on your industry of course.

If you ask an AdWords rep, they will tell you that anything above 1% is a good CTR. This seems rather low, but that's Google's official answer if you pose the question to them.