Articles


PPC Marketing - Does It Pay?

by Albert Weiss

Pay Per Click marketing is known as PPC. With PPC marketing, payment is made to the search engine every time a lead clicks the link in your listing and goes to your website.

The fact of the matter is, it will probably take between 6 and 12 months to circumvent being deliberately filtered out of the SERPS by Google. Even after that, you'll still have to wait until your site begins to rank high enough in the search engine results to start getting clicks and traffic to your website. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the search engine pages by making use of pay per click

Like lots of other areas of Internet marketing, keyword investigation is a critical part of PPC marketing. You have to know which keywords and keyword phrases the preponderance of people are using to hunt for what it is that you are trying to sell.

When you start a PPC marketing campaign, you are actually involving yourself in an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are used the majority of the time, with the highest listings going to the people who bid the most. The more that a business is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher that website will be listed in the search results, which are usually at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

PPC marketing has become highly cutthroat for many of the popular keywords, which can sell for anywhere from five cents per click to many, many dollars.

PPC marketing is often filled with fake clicks. Competitors will click on your ads to drive up your PPC marketing bill to try to get you to stop competing. There have also been some allegations and lawsuits regarding fraud that is perpetrated by the search engine companies themselves. And the Plaintiffs won at least one of these lawsuits that I read about.

I could write a lot about this area of marketing. But I think that your interests would be better served if I just "cut to the chase." Conversion rates vary widely by industry on the Internet. But the average is similar to what is produced in the mail-order business, which is between one half of one percent, and two percent. And in the real world, projecting a one percent conversion rate would be fairly safe, though there are millions of unkonwn factors that can make the one percent estimate much too high.

What that means is that out of every 100 clicks on your links, you might get one actual sale. So if the markup (Gross Profit) on your average sale is fifty dollars, and your clicks cost you fifty cents each, you can't afford PPC marketing because 100 clicks times fifty cents per click = fifty dollars and you only broke even.

Don't forget, "Gross Profit" doesn't include your overhead. It's only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the above example you really lost money. You have got to know what your costs are, and that includes how much it costs to own your equipment, pay your rent, ISP, etc., plus the value of your time.

The bottom line is that most PPC advertising has been bid up too high by the larger businesses and can be difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using PPC advertising.

Watch out for of the companies who will offer to administer your PPC advertising for a fee because they can't change the laws of math or physics. They will claim that they have the proficiency to help you, and they may very well. But they still can't change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that PPC advertising can work, but you have got to carefully do the math. Can you make a reasonable profit based on the above if you pay the current bid price for the keywords and get only about a 1/10th of 1% or 2/10ths of 1% conversion rate (sales rate)? If you can, then PPC advertising may very well work in your case.

I recommend that you stick with niche terms that have not been bid way up. Personally, in my industry I'm only willing to pay between 15 cents and 40 cents maximum per click, and my products sell for between $40.00 and $150.00.

Pay per click marketing? Do the math first, and then make a decision. But be willing to lose money while you learn how to make it work!

Personally, I've found several search engine optimization techniques that are far more effective than PPC marketing. These other techniques have led me to promote my site to the top of the organic listings on the major search engines for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. A reason that these other methods are far more effective is they cost little or nothing. And most people searching the Internet attribute a lot more reliability to websites that rank high in the organic listings vs the paid listings.

By using these methods, in well under one year, I've been able to make my site rank better than other ecommerce sites in my industry that have been at it for 10 years or even more!

In the longer term, you will want to optimize your site and work on getting backlinks to raise your ranking in the organic listings. Many people use reciprocal linking trading to promote their website.

However, one-way backlinks are far more effective at raising your standings in the organic listings. I've been very successful at getting one-way backlinks and I've documented the steps I took to get lots of free traffic to my website to make it successful by relying on article spinning.

Albert Weiss, the author, has written up how he gets a lot of free traffic to his ecommerce site by relying on article spinning, as well as other effective SEO techniques that you can employ yourself for free. He will tell you who the real SEO Experts are on his Free SEO Information Website.

Published May 14th, 2007

Filed in Advertising, Computer, Ecommerce