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Digital Team at The Woodland Trust
20 June 2008 08:21am
Hi there - we are a UK based conservation charity planning our first major PPC campaign for online membership recruitment.
Looking at the Google results for our proposed keywords we can see that many do not have enough usage data to give us comprehensive bid statistics, but for the words we can get data for, the average seems to be around £0.30 to £0.50 cpc and still a very broad estimate.
The other variable factor in calculating our overall potential ROI, is the conversion rate of the online shop. Having never run this type of campaign for membership before, we can again only estimate based on current conversion figures.
Our shop activities have 3 distinct product areas with conversion rates ranging from 0.7% to 2.9% to 4.9% - the higher figure reflecting the high use of the shop for fulfillment from offline marketing and customers entering the shop having already made the commitment to purchase.
So I was wondering if any one with membership organisation experience would like to share PPC costs and conversion rates to help us gain a better idea of what to expect.
Many thanks
Retired at Retired
20 June 2008 12:18pm
The google keywords tool is not 100% accurate. Don't get me wrong it is a great tool and extremely useful but the results are not to the penny.
For example for the key phrase "market research reports" the keyword tool tells me that for positions 1-3 the estimated CPC is £0.58 I am actually bidding £0.80 and paying £0.70 and achieving average position 2.3.
My best suggestion is to use the keyword tool to select keywords and then start with low bids and slowly ramp them up checking the position daily until you have go to the position / cost / conversion that you want.
There are people around who will aautomate this process for you and no doubt they will be responding to your post, but for a modest campaign you can probably manage it manually.
PS in composing the ad check out 'keyword insertion'. Very useful and seemingly under-used. Could give you an edge.
Bob
Textor