It is no shock to anyone that has used Google Adwords that it is expensive, with prices rising since the day Adwords began in October 2000. Google Adwords works on a cost per click basis, meaning your ad can be shown thousands of times and you only have to pay for the advertising when someone clicks on the advert. Each keyword on Google can be bid on by all other Adwords advertisers and Google ranks each advert on how much each advertiser is ‘bidding’ per click (along with a number of other factors). Competition between advertisers to have their advert showing first (and therefore get the majority of the search traffic) has driven many keywords to levels most people would call ‘insane’ with the top keyword in New Zealand (‘buy health insurance’) coming in at $47.58 per click.
New Zealand’s cost per click’s on keywords may seem high, but our click costs are actually reasonably cheap compared to other countries, with the highest cost per click in the US costing $142.67 for the keyword ‘mesothelioma settlement’ (a disease caused by cancer which in the US results in huge lawsuits and therefore lawyers willing to pay a lot to get each case). This infographic from Wordstream also lists some other expensive industries in the US.
To give you an idea on New Zealand’s most expensive keywords, I have listed the top 50 keywords below. Not suprisingly all keywords listed appear in high value industries where there is a large profit margin per sale or a large lifetime value per customer. It is important to note, that although the costs seem extremely high they can be profitable with the right strategy and a high enough conversion rate. Generally speaking, if a keyword was not profitable there would come a time when advertisers would have to pull their advertising so the ‘average cpc’ metric can be used to determine high value keywords (which is useful for SEO campaigns).
This is by no means a complete list so if you are using Google’s Keyword Planner and spot some expensive keywords that would fit in this list please let me know in the comments.
Keywords With The Highest Average CPCs on Adwords in New Zealand
