Are Ahref's CPC numbers accurate?

[Sutra]

This is a retarded question, hah:

When Ahrefs shows $0 cpc for a keyword, in general how close is that to reality? Obviously, it will cost something for an advertiser to bid on the keyword. But is there actually a good possibility it will only be 1 cent, 3 cents, 5 cents, etc?

 

[Ryuzaki]

When Ahrefs shows $0 cpc for a keyword, in general how close is that to reality? Obviously, it will cost something for an advertiser to bid on the keyword. But is there actually a good possibility it will only be 1 cent, 3 cents, 5 cents, etc?

Disregarding whether or not the Ahrefs information is accurate, there's generally advertisers that will bid on anything at the minimum floor, meaning they're willing to pay a penny and be the "100% fill rate" type of advertiser. Basically, if nobody else is willing to pay for it, they'll swoop in at the very minimum and take the impression. Of course there may be a handful of these people pushing it up to 2¢ or 3¢ even. It's very realistic that this happens, and if Ahrefs has an accurate data source in this regard, then yes. It even happens on high CPC keywords when advertiser budgets run up for the day, etc.

 

[Sutra]

Disregarding whether or not the Ahrefs information is accurate, there's generally advertisers that will bid on anything at the minimum floor, meaning they're willing to pay a penny and be the "100% fill rate" type of advertiser. Basically, if nobody else is willing to pay for it, they'll swoop in at the very minimum and take the impression. Of course there may be a handful of these people pushing it up to 2¢ or 3¢ even. It's very realistic that this happens, and if Ahrefs has an accurate data source in this regard, then yes. It even happens on high CPC keywords when advertiser budgets run up for the day, etc.

Well, that is fantastic news. Looks like I’ll have a whole new traffic source to exploit.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Well, that is fantastic news. Looks like I’ll have a whole new traffic source to exploit.

I'd just keep in mind that we're talking about CPC and not CPM. If they bid a 1¢ CPC you still have to generate the click to get that penny. But if you're talking about one of the major CPM networks, you're going to make a fraction of a penny per impression but your overall CPM will end up being much higher than what the CPC-based CPMs would have given you. This is because a lot of advertisers bid on your site and topic and not on your keywords in these impression-based networks.

 

[CCarter]

pay a penny and be the "100% fill rate" type of advertiser.

This is exactly the strategy "We Buy Ugly Houses" (https://www.webuyuglyhouses.com/) and InventHelp (https://inventhelp.com/) - Caveman Inventor helping service, did with late night un-sold commercial slots on TV. I believe it was these two - going off of memory.

They went to the Networks and said "we'll buy all your unsold commercial slots." Obviously the networks said "we don't have any unsold slots." LOL They did. After some back and forth negotiations they got the unsold slots and if you remember when late at nights you always saw that caveman for inventors commercial starting around 11:00 pm, and always throughout the night, for years.

This happened until others caught on, but then the internet came and pretty much through a wrench in TV's dominance in reaching audiences since now you could target users directly and even extremely smaller players could get in. A small company called Amazon started using CPC arbitration to scope up users from Google and the rest is history.

FYI - the lowest cost per bid is $.05 I believe, at least with Adwords a while back.

 

[Sutra]

I'd just keep in mind that we're talking about CPC and not CPM. If they bid a 1¢ CPC you still have to generate the click to get that penny. But if you're talking about one of the major CPM networks, you're going to make a fraction of a penny per impression but your overall CPM will end up being much higher than what the CPC-based CPMs would have given you. This is because a lot of advertisers bid on your site and topic and not on your keywords in these impression-based networks.

In this case I’m actually considering being the advertiser. There are tons of keywords with $0 cpc. I still need to look into it further but my initial thought is if I can find a way to create ads in bulk quickly for these types of keywords, I can flood the market with advertising to force myself into the brains of millions of people.