Firstly I don’t claim to be a PPC expert, so if anyone who is big on PPC reads this please comment. Now everyone knows some terms cost more than others so for example you’d expect to pay over £1 per click on a term like “hotels” however, how much would you expect for a term such as “hotels in costa del sol” or even more niche “Balcon de Europa Hotel Nerja” (a hotel on the Costa del Sol).
Well when helping people new into travel who wish to start PPC straight away it can usually take a bit of time to explain to them just how competitive it is and just how high bid prices can go. So as with everything to maximise ROI you need to go niche – but how do you manage this as every hotel name, resort name, country name and variation has a full set of ads showing on it so surely the bid prices must be stupidly high on every term.
Not quite, because the majority of PPC ads are shown on a phrase match some ads can get shown for a variety of terms. In the above example someone bidding on “hotel” would appear for “hotel”, “hotels in costa del sol” and “Balcon de Europa Hotel Nerja” which is why there is usually a full set of ads for anything you search on. However you can use this to your advantage, because they are showing on everything hotel related the chances re they will have a fairly low CTR possibly in the region of 3-4% as their ad copy will not relate or be strong enough on every hotel related search term.
So we can guess they have a weak CTR and are paying a lot to show, we don’t want to be in the same situation we want to be paying as little as possible with a CTR of over 20%. Hotel name seems like the most niche we can go at this stage as if someone is searching for a specific hotel name the chances are they have been there before and want to go again, have been recommended it or have seen it somewhere either way they have a high interest to be actually searching for its name. But our advert is new, it has no CTR history and Google already has a full set of ads we’re not going to get shown cheaply. So you have to be prepared to make a loss to start with, what sort of max CPC should you set? Again this is only a guide but 60p should do it, remembering that you only need your advert to get shown and clicked on a few times to build up a CTR history.
As the history builds and your ad gets a 10%, 20% or 30% CTR you will notice your advert climb above all the other generic hotel adverts and you will notice that even though your max CPC is 60p your only paying 20p per click or less. It makes sense, if you search for a hotel name the generic “we have 60,000 hotels worldwide, book now” adverts are not relevant – yours is at its focused on the hotel they have searched for.
So how much would you expect to pay for a niche term? To start with, too much, as time goes on, very little
