Adwords - Simply too expensive?

[Oracle]

I used google adwords keyword planner to estimate the cost of a top keyword for the sports betting market - "football betting tips"

From the keyword planner a daily budget of EUR 20 will give me between 0 and 4.3 clicks per day - best case scenario each click will cost me EUR 4.65 (plus tax?).

Obviously this is not doable whatsoever as the top 2 paid results are ladbrokes.com and paddypower.com, both of which have an annual turnover in excess of EUR 1,000,000,000.

The 4th organic result was a site with soccer in the URL. How they managed to rank so highly is admirable considering their parent company is based in the United Kingdom where the locals always search for 'football' and almost never 'soccer'.

This is the main keyword I want to rank for, but it will have to be done without adwords.

There is a small site I know of for a while that definitely does not pay for advertising which ranked number 3 however that is from a journalist that writes for a major Scottish newspaper.

I am trying to develop a strategy to maximize my exposure for this keyword in the UK and Ireland. If anybody could give me useful advice that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[muffincrumbs]

You have to figure that operators are inflating Adwords since that have the cash to do it. Also so that they don't have to pay affiliates, making the prices a little out of hand. Check out the bid for "online casino"

 

[slotplayer]

is that a broad match, a phrase or and exact match you're targeting?
the other consideration is the campaign type, is it the search and display network, search only network or display only network?

 

[pinkytoe]

I actually wouldn't consider it a top keyword for the sports betting niche.

Regardless, yes it's pretty tough to compete with an operator for adwords. They have such a big budget and bid on broad terms. They also are more likely to be accepted by Google as they are not a bridge page. Finally I assume they have pretty decent a/b testing where they can maximize the value of their clicks.