The tables full of CPC data weren’t intended to be seen as “the big picture.” They are merely part of the equation, but one many/most readers would be curious about. That’s why they were included in the second half of this article. (Please note: In all fairness, the article did say “If you’re going to pay upwards of $10 for people to click on your ads, then you damn well better know how to convert them into new accounts.”)

I completely agree with you about paying for your own name. To me, that’s a ridiculously silly practice. If you’ve got your SEO game together and rank well organically, then the need for SEM — particularly for your own name — isn’t as great.

Great topic. From my experience managing Google AdWords campaigns over the past five years, I’d add the following ideas to think about:

Looking at the Cost Per Click is one way to evaluate the cost, but I find it more important to optimize campaigns based on Cost Per Conversion (where tracking one is possible). Our credit union might be willing to pay $.50 more a click, if it exponentially increases conversions – the ultimate goal.

Yes. Loan campaigns – particularly mortgage campaigns – are very competitive. However, with several years of positive history, relevant landing pages, and optimized ads the CPC can be significantly lower that what is quoted above. And when you get more focused on your terms – and use more long-tail keywords, conversion costs actually go down.

I totally agree with you on the geographic targeting. It’s an absolute must for community credit unions that want to manage costs and increasing conversions.

But, I’d beg to differ on your competitor stance…. From my experience, when you go after competitor names, costs go up (because relevance goes down) and conversions go down. Working within a limited budget, I’d rather spend funds on higher performing keywords.

Capital One may have lots of extra funds to spend on its own name (and lots of competitors), but I specifically exclude our credit union name from the keywords. We rank organically very well, so it’s cost prohibitive to pay for clicks that would have happened naturally.

One thing to remember is that AdWords campaigns can come and go abruptly due to the daily- and monthly budget limits users can set. You could literally do a Google search that generates an ad, then repeat the search a millisecond later and the ad would be gone. It all depends on how quickly budgets are consumed. If your campaign has very low budgets, your ad might only be seen a few times before one or two people click and use up your daily allotment.

This is why it’s a good idea to search the keywords you’d like to buy at various times throughout the month. You can’t just do a search one day and say, “Oh look, no one is buying AdWords for this term.” Keep searching, especially at the beginning of the month when budgets reset.

How do you know Capital One is bidding on its own search terms? Because there are no Adwords ads that appear with a search of “Capital One”?