The Reason Ask.com has Higher CPC’s
17th July 2006
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Ask.com typically has higher CPC’s than all the other Search Engines. Why is this so? I believe it’s mainly for 2 reasons. 1) Ask.com requires a “Minimum CPC” for each keyword.
They calculate the keyword Min CPC by how the keyword has performed historically, and the “market rates”. “Market rates”…meaning the CPC’s are based on the positioning, and competitor prices, then taking into consideration a handful of other factors. Seasonality of keyword cost is also a consideration, and could artificially inflate the minimum cpc’s. 2) Ask.com requires a minimum CTR of 1.48%. If the CTR falls below that, then your ad will NOT be served on Ask. It will only be served on their Syndication sites. Also, if the CTR is not at least .75, the ad is not getting shown anywhere. So, besides the Min CPC, advertisers need to bid high enough so not to drop below the minimum CTR threshold. Furthermore, their reports don’t show Impressions. So, it becomes very difficult to optimize. If advertisers could see Impressions, then they could see better how to fix the ad. IMHO, the 2 reason’s above explain the higher CPC. Something else that’s notable about Ask.com is their Keyword Inventory. Their Keyword Inventory is much less than Google, Yahoo, or MSN’s. Therefore, Ask.com works well for some advertisers (verticals), and horribly for others. As opposed to Google which has such a large Keyword Inventory. Although, all in all, Ask’s quality of traffic is very good. No related posts. |
July 18th, 2006 at
Shimon…. good post, though when you get to a more expensive keywords, that’s when you start seeing that ASK is actually charging less.
For example … keywords we target cost on average $5-6 per click on Google. They are a approximately the same on Yahoo and ASK would charge about $2 per click for that same keyword.
You see, when it comes down to keywords, CPC and conversion it can’t be summarized and averaged for all industries. It really depends on the industry, competition and keyword.
I’ll tell you one thing … ASK is a huge disappointment to advertisers. Even though their traffic is pretty good (for me) and conversion rate is OK … you simply can’t reach anyone there. They had phone support … that’s gone.
E-mails? You’ll get a reply in 3 days and that will be the last you hear from them.
Shimon … you’re in NYC right?
July 18th, 2006 at
Hi Igor,
Yeah, I’m in NYC. And another piece of information on how Ask calculates the Min CPC. They try to base it on position #3 in Google. So, you can imagine for a highly competitive term like, “credit cards” where’d you have to start bidding.
Although, to their credit, I believe Ask.com is ranked as one of the top converting Search Engines for the Retail vertical.