Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
saying something along the lines of “$1,000 to click here” will create a high ctr,
but unless you actually give away money, it will create an even higher bounce rate and
essentially create no value. So to begin with, see ctr only as a component and direct
your energy toward another optimization goal. With this rule of thumb in mind, how
would you evaluate the ad shown in Figure 11.8?
disclaimer: i don't know anything about the actual results of the campaign
running the ad shown in Figure 11.8. But it illustrates my concern about being overly
aggressive in your message to the extent that this becomes the goal itself. remember,
there is no value in a visit by itself—there is only a cost associated with it. the key-
words that produce valuable visits and visitors are driven out of the paid search pro-
gram in exchange for cheap clicks. Once you can think through this chain of results,
the better you will be at optimizing the results for your business.
moving on to a more serious optimization metric, the Visit-to-Sales conversion
metric, we get something that might start to make a difference. See Figure 11.9.
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Figure 11.8
Paid search ad, with an aggressive CTR focus
Figure 11.9
Custom paid search report on the visit-to-sales conversion rate
as Figure 11.9 shows, we will be optimizing on our current 0.88 percent visit-
to-sale conversion. We should have the ability to drill into this report on a campaign,
ad group, or keyword listing level.
Visit-to-Sales conversion is a reasonable metric to use, and it might even work
for you, but only if you have all your sales within that first visit, and only if you don't
expect to sell any other products to this person over time. there are a number of other
constraints as well.
in the report shown in Figure 11.10, you can see that only a few keywords pro-
vide us with a visit-to-sale conversion.
