Adwords for a Church Website

Search engine marketers pay very close attention to click-through-rates, or CTR's, of their ads.  They do lots of A/B split testing, optimization, and iteration to as many visitors to their website as possible. 

The Google Adwords system allows marketers to test very efficiently and quickly.  Here's a case study showing how a small headline change more than doubled click-through-rate.

When I did my little experiment to understand how many people are googling for churches, my one ad got a pretty high CTR of 4.12%

But my sample size was too small to make a reasonable conclusion about a typical CTR for a church website ad.  And I'm curious to know what would have happened with different headlines and ad text.  Has anyone else run an Adwords campaigns for their church website?  If so - what kind of CTR's did you see?

Or are local churches not taking advantage of this kind of targeted and local advertising yet?  I'll update this post if anyone has some insightful anecdotes or best practices to share. 

- Joe Suh of MyChurch

Comments

[Nathan Ketsdever]

Google, Microsoft, and even Stumble-upon all offer pay per click advertising or what is commonly called "paid search" I think more churches and nonprofits should take advantage of this super cheap advertising, because you are able to contact the person exactly when they are looking for info about you. And at least for clicks between .05 and .25, its far cheaper than even a phone book ad.

[Frank Johnson]

Joe:

You should talk to Scott Aughtmon of Pathway Church in Palo Alto:

http://www.experiencepathway.com/

Scott does a fair amount of pay-per-click advertising to draw people to the gatherings of the church.

I'd be happy to introduce you if you'd like. Or maybe I'll just point Scott here.

Frank

[scott aughtmon]

Hey Joe,

Frank pointed me here to this post...

Here are my CTR stats for Google Adwords for today...

2.10%
2.22%
3.22%

I've had higher and lower percentages.

I have A/B tests going for all of our ads to always see which in the best ad.

I think this is the best and most economical way for a church to advertise, because most people use search engines instead of phone books. Plus you only pay when someone responds (clicks on) to your ad. With a phone book ad you pay whether someone ever sees it or not!

[Joe Suh]

Scott, thanks for popping in and sharing some ctr data. I just checked out one of your adwords:

Not Your Typical Church
A "Hybrid Church" using house
gatherings and larger gatherings

Good stuff. If you ever post a blog that shares more of your PPC experiments, please point me to it. I'd be happy to update this post with a summary and link to it (ex. showing which ads yielded what CTR's, what keywords you bid on, volume of searches, etc)

I think a lot of other local churches could benefit/learn from your work. And I agree phone book advertising makes little sense nowadays :)