Keyword Bid Information -- Who's paying the most for "Real Estate"?

[keswickwebmaster]

Overture is a PPC search engine by Yahoo! (just in case you didn't know) Website owners bid on keywords and the ones with the higher bids get ranked first on the site in order of bids. I think that's a pretty cut and dry explaination.

I was talking to an agent in the office yesterday about the pros and cons about using a PPC service, Pros being possible higher ranking and Cons being the cost.

Click fraud is huge among the PPC community, especially in competitive markets. Competitors can easily click your ad and rack up your bill just the same as a client could. Not cool if you're trying to stretch your buck between comissions.

This morning I checked my email (spam ridden of course -- I love being a webmaster ) and actually stopped to read an article that "found" it's way into my inbox. It's from SitePro News and is about exactly what I was talking about yesterday. It offers a Comparison of Paid Search Advertising Models.

excerpt from the article:

If you use the Web-Professor bid tool to check keywords at Overture and you type in the keyword "mesothelioma", you'll find 30 bidders vying for that term and a maximum bid of $29.88 per clíck! If the maximum bidder converts traffïc to salës at the national average of 3%, then he or she is paying an average of $900 to get one client!

Personally I did the same search and found 40 bidders that range from $0.10/click to $25.80/click but still the point stands. That's expensive prospecting!

I did a comparison search on "Real Estate" to find out how the stats stacked up and was shocked at how cheap realtors can be! Alright, I'm not shocked... but I figured the bids would be a lot higher.

Statistics
Market: United States
phrase average bid median std_dev min bid max bid number
Real Estate 0.702 1.395 0.462 0.29 2.50 39
Realtor 0.454 0.610 0.339 0.11 1.11 40
Homes For Sale 0.412 0.575 0.232 0.15 1.00 39

In any case we wont be bidding on any PPC terms in the near future, but it is good to know that there is still plenty of wiggle room for PPC bids in the real estate industry.

[keswickwebmaster]

Ooops, sorry that was rude of me, I didn't even provide the TOOL I used to find the keywords. That was the point of posting in this Forum afterall.

Bid Stats Tool
http://web-professor.net/tools/bidstats/

[pcdoc]

click fraud is huge among the PPC community

exactly, and that's one reason why G is down to $376 and my Sept and Dec puts are up $1,400 this morning.

[legalhomeforms]

A great tool to see exactly who and how much someone is bidding on Overture is this tool:
http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm...tools/bidtool/

[Bob Crain]

Not sure how accurate this tool is http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm...tools/bidtool/

My account is turned off and it shows my site in there?

[Eric Blackwell]

Just a thought, but I have seen some of these tools that simply grab data from the previous day...Was your account "on" yesterday?

Eric

[Bob Crain]

Nope, has not been on for over a month. I prefer Google adwords and get way less click fraud from them then I was getting from Yahoo.

In fact, I got a lot of clicks with overture but the time per user session was WAY less then normal about two minutes less across the board. And the number of pages viewed per session was 4 pages less per user.

So running the same or similar ads in Adwords is getting better results.

[webprofessor]

A great tool to see exactly who and how much someone is bidding on Overture is this tool:
http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm...tools/bidtool/

My tool pulls the data from the tool you listed. So if you need a useful summary of whats going on my tool would be more appropriate. If you need to know who is bidding then use the one you listed.

Ooops, sorry that was rude of me, I didn't even provide the TOOL I used to find the keywords. That was the point of posting in this Forum afterall.

Bid Stats Tool
http://web-professor.net/tools/bidstats/

I'm glad you thought the tool was useful. I am looking forward to seeing Panama roll out so we can make it even more useful.

[Search Engine Book]

I would expect bids on a phrase like "real estate" to be low. It's probably a highly unsuccessful phrase to focus on, because you'd get a large percentage of unqualified clicks running up your costs (people entering the real estate profession, people looking for real estate in another state or country, some high school kid doing a research paper, etc.)

I bet if you compare bids on a general phrase like "real estate" to something more specific like "austin real estate" or "san diego real estate" you'll see a big difference in the amounts bid.

Interesting research. Thanks for sharing!

[Borino]

For what it's worth, I'm running big PPC campaigns on Google and Overture (not real estate related), and Overture is significantly more expensive, sometimes up to 50% more per term.