4-5% CTR - good or crap?

[Roundabout]

I'm from the ugly world of email marketing, trying PPC out. Spent the entire weekend pouring over the archives here, got more than enough solid tips and a good foundation to begin without having to really ask too many questions (mostly for fear of the answers I'd get).

Well, I can't seem to find anyone discussing a basic building block to this process, so here it goes.

My first campaign. Total spent: $500. total earned: $600. Every day I made a small profit of about $20. Total clicks: 700. Through ad swapping and tests got my CTR from 1% up to 4.8% (through Yahoo only). Total time invested: about 5 days.

My question is, at what point do you say "This is it, this is the best I can do, let's move this puppy over to Google and ramp up the volume on the keywords I know are working over at Yahoo?" What range should I be shooting for with CTR? Several books I read show a CTR of 3% and label it as "great". Sounds low to me?

Final Q: if $500 earns me $600, and I'm spending $100 a day to make $120 a day, can I assume that investing $1000 per day should more or less yield $1200 a day and go into this project with expectations of this campaign earning me about $200 a day? I understand some days will be higher, some lower, i'm talking law of averages, and more importantly, trying to determine how one goes about projecting a campaign's value.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

 

[WayneDog]

My question is, at what point do you say "This is it, this is the best I can do, let's move this puppy over to Google and ramp up the volume on the keywords I know are working over at Yahoo?" What range should I be shooting for with CTR? Several books I read show a CTR of 3% and label it as "great". Sounds low to me?

You should never stop trying to improve your CTR. To me a 4.8% CTR seems low for search but it all depends on your position, keywords your targeting, relevancy, etc so really it's hard to say what's good without knowing more. I have gotten consistent CTR's in the 30%+ range on some stuff with top position in the past.

Besides improving your CTR all the time you should also never stop trying to expand your keyword list. I don't know what your niche is but chances are it can earn you a hell of a lot more than $200 a day if you keep working on expanding and optimizing all the time. Don't just move it to google, put it on msn and then try traffic from every other place you can think of.