Pay per click stats

[Lydia]

I run a very small CPC campaign, mainly using tips from Ronnie and other posters here. I use a huge list of negative keywords, only phrase matches, and monitor my CTR and bounce rate as my main metrics.

Since everyone likes to keep their success and failures close to the vest, I'll come 'clean' and show everyone what I've got this last month. I hope it's representative of a pretty good set of campaigns, although I'm sure some of us have much better results than this. My budget is very small, and even so I rarely use all of it because I usually pay less than $1 a click.

Pages/Visit: 36.50

Avg. Time on Site: 00:14:23

% New Visits: 86.36%

Bounce Rate: 13.64%

OK, there you have it. It is possible to deliver good, targeted traffic with CPC, but you really have to work at it. The only thing is, you just never know the real ROI. You just have to hope that you can convert those visitors into physical sales...

[Cherie]

Ah, don't you just love these REW sites. I can't help but smile when I see that you have a 13.64% bounce rate. That pretty much sums up a ton of other statistics that you could be talking about.

Would be interesting to see where you are sending your initial ppc landing page to, is it the homepage? And do you have a fair amount of returning visitors? Is this a national or local campaign.

Your left hand navigation looks like it has some weird spacing, and the "Search For Homes" is wrapping strangely. This is one of your main nav's so I would check that out.

Love the colors, very soothing.

[Lydia]

Cherie - We've had all sorts of problems with the site looking different depending on the browser of the visitor. In Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, and IE7 it looks fine. With some older versions of IE the navbar starts to wrap around. I've even looked at it with IE6 and it looks fine until I'm at another machine with IE6. Bizarre, but there you go.

Thanks for the compliment about the site though!

I use both local and national campaigns, and most of the landing pages are interior to the site. Only a very few of my ad groups go to the main index page.

Usually about 40% of my total site traffic is returning. PPC only gives me 4% of my total traffic- the rest is organic and referrals.

[RonnieG]

Not to rain on your parade, but if you require new visitors to click a link on your landing page to actually begin the search process, and that takes them to a 2nd page, perhaps with a search criteria form, or to get results by a specific price range for that community, that would explain the very low bounce rate. Bounce rate is based on visitors getting to the landing page and leaving immediately, without looking at anything else on the site. How many of your visitors only look at 2-3 pages, then leave? That may be a better indication of the true "bounce" rate.

[Lydia]

When you are averaging well over 30+ average pages per visitor, it's hard to get very many visitors for only 2-3 pages...

The low is usually about 9-10 pages, with highs in the 100's.

Organic average is much lower, about 12 pageviews per visit. I attribute that as much to long tails as anything. 'Fun stuff to do in Augusta' is a popular hit, but they only stay for a page or two. I mean, I do run a real estate site here after all.