As Reported by Efficient Frontier, below is a look at the average cost-per-click in major paid search marketing campaigns by vertical industry for June 2008, compared to May 2008.The vertical industries with the most fluctuations were Mortgage, Travel, Retail and Finance.
Full coverage of the data in the report can be found at www.SearchEngineWatch.com or on Efficient Frontier’s Blog here.
From an online marketer’s perspective, here are factors that can cause cost-per-click data to fluctuate:
- More advertisers entering the market
- More aggressive bidding to maintain positioning
- Better quality search ads and quality score as determined by the search engine
What do these micro-changes in price reveal to Marketers about current business trends?
In this report, Mortgage advertisers experienced a 12% increase in average cost-per-click which can be interpreted in several different ways:
- Are more mortgage advertisers shifting dollars from other offline tactics like print, TV and Outdoor?
- Is the increase the result of projected increases in real estate activity during summer months?
- Have mortgage leads become more valuable due to lower demand? (Thus causing higher cost-per-click tolerance)
