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How healthy is your Paid Search program?

Rolling into the holidays, it’s important to make sure your program is in tip top shape. It’s a good time to take a careful look under the hood to make sure the fundamental economics of PPC are being well-handled.

We thought it was also a good time to take a look at some industry stats that can serve as useful benchmarks for monitoring the growth and health of your program.

Two key stats from yesterday’s post:

  1. the ratio of non-brand competitive search sales to total PPC sales. Whether the number is high or low has as much to do with the power of off-line marketing efforts as anything, but the trend can indicate the relative progress of the program.
  2. the ratio of non-brand PPC sales to total site sales. Again, the overall number is less important than the trend.

The relationship between competitive PPC, Brand PPC and total site sales is hugely impacted by business models. Below, I’ve tried to take business model effects out of the picture to look at the impact of product categories on the relative size of competitive PPC. The first column shows non-brand search sales as a fraction of total site sales; the second shows non-brand search sales as a function of total PPC sales.

Category PPC Performance

These data may mean nothing at all, however, it does appear that intuition is supported by the numbers. Intuitively it makes sense that search will be a bigger and better channel for companies that sell easily definable products. Products with manufacturer and model names and numbers. It is easier to sell the Acme Premier Widget Model 123 than the proverbial “black dress” because the search terms match the products better.

I’d be interested in hearing what others see in this data or their own!

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Blogs Citing This Post

  1. Pingback: HELM, WHM/cPanel, Windows, Linux and SEO Blog » Blog Archive » SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 12, 2007 on October 12, 2007
  2. Pingback: pay per click » <b>PPC</b> Benchmarks by Product Category on October 18, 2007

Comments

  1. Matthew, July 9, 2008:

    When we paid for ads, we only noticed about a 10% increase in traffic from them which almost broke even

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Recent Comments

  • George Michie: Chris, I wouldn't be surprised if that's a real number. Inc says they have 550 employees, so their income would have to be $50...
  • George Michie: Hi Christian, I suppose they take the same percentage hit off their commission that the retailer does. To my thinking it's the...
  • Chris Zaharias: I read the magazine on a flight Sunday and recall seeing iCrossing on there at ~~$100M in revenues, and thought the same thing of...
  • Alan Rimm-Kaufman: Christian -- I didn't mean to imply all retailers will face Q4 losses. But it is not improbable that many retailers will be...
  • Christian Little: Despite the economic crisis, how could most retailers be facing a Q4 loss? For most retail this is the best time of the year, you...
  • Christian Little: That's pretty remarkable...makes me want to build a coupon site lol. Don't coupon sites take a huge hit in commissions though...
  • Stephen Schramke: Sage advice. Thanks for sharing!
  • George Michie: Could be Neil. I have my doubts. My suspicion is that there just isn't much work being done, other than taking commission checks to...
  • Neilzb: Those numbers are pretty remarkable, but if I had to guess I would say that it’s possible that they are just 8 people 'outsourcing' full...
  • Jeff Cornejo: I disagree that a revenue/employee ratio shows ANY kind of profitability. If anything, a mostly-passthrough model, with high...
  • George Michie: Hi Dan, The IP address of the advertiser isn't a factor, anyone can run geo-targeted ads regardless of where their website resides....
  • dan shipe: Hey, me again. What about possible exploits to this system? Adwords must evaluate the geographic region based on the IP address of the...
  • Mark Matsusaki: I think I'm in agreement with the previous posting in that ROI is the metric used by many decision makers to measure the value of...
  • George Michie: Thanks for your comments Ophir, you raise excellent points. Particularly as Geo-targeting competition in different areas moves...
  • SEO Services: Nice Post. Thanks for sharing this information with us.

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