CogBlog

In 1997 I co-founded COGBOX in with Michelle DeCol. Since then we've offered online marketing, web development and corporate and brand identity to a wide range of clients. Here I post thoughts and comments on search marketing, recent projects, and other things I find interesting.

Most Expensive AdWords Terms

Published Monday, September 11, 2006 by chris | E-mail this post

Here's an interesting list of the most expensive current adwords phrases:

http://www.theproguy.com/most-expensive-adwords.html

Apparently there are some quite large margins in the "student loan consolidation" business. At $69.16/click they must be making a bundle from each actual sale.

Let's see, this site http://www.nextstudent.com is the current top bidder (yes, I clicked the link...). Drops visitors directly on a lead gen page with a contact form. They ask for a fair amount of information, including a social security number, which probably hurts their conversion rates (I'm sure it is necessary). From the query string it looks like they're tracking everything, so I'm sure I'm seeing one of many landing page variants.

But, assuming they have a 5% lead conversion rate, they are still looking at a $1,400 cost per lead? It must be better than that...but still at 10% they are looking at $700/lead, and that is just a pre-qualifier. Those cost of sale expenses are going to add up quick. Hope they have some good salespeople.