[I’ve read a few times that before jumping into an SEO campaign, it’s a good idea to confirm the traffic volume estimates you receive in tools like the Adwords tool, by running a PPC campaign. In doing so, I’ve heard that part of the goal of this type of PPC campaign is to keep the click-thru rate as low as possible – since the only object is to keep your AD on the first page to confirm the volume. Does anyone have any idea what to put in the AD, that will ensure people will not want to click thru on it? I have a feeling that if the AD stands out, people may click on it for that reason & if it’s “on message” in any regard, to the product or service you are selling, – then it may also be clicked on.]
Unfortunately, you may not be able to get reliable data that way. You should actually try to get the highest click-through rate possible. If you write an ad that gets low CTR your Quality Score will be lowered and you will have to bid and pay a very high price for each click to get your ad on the first page for impressions.
A higher CTR leads to lower CPC and will allow you to test candidate page titles and description snippets for your organic SEO CTRs.
Additionally, you need to set very high daily budgets and high maximum bids to prevent the throttling of your ad delivery. If you set those too low you will have your impressions throttled and not get a true picture of potential traffic.
There is just no way to get valid data on the cheap with this type of testing. The good news is: the more your test costs to perform, the greater the commercial potential of the keyword. The tests that cost the most to perform will generally hold the greatest potential profit.
