PPC Advertising - Does It Really Pay?

by Albert Weiss

Pay Per Click promotion is also known as PPC. With pay per click marketing, you pay the search engines each time someone clicks the link in your ad and goes to your site.

Let's face it, it will probably take between six and twelve months to evade being deliberately filtered out of the SERPS by Google. Even after that, you'll still have to wait until your website begins to rank high enough in the SERPS to start receiving mouse clicks and traffic. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the SE pages by paying for clicks

Like many other aspects of Internet advertising, keyword investigation is an important part of pay per click marketing. You must know which keywords and keyword phrases the preponderance of searchers are employing to seek out what it is that you are offering.

When you start a pay per click marketing campaign, you are actually getting yourself into an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are most popular, with the highest listings going to the people who bid the most. The more that a website is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher that site 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.

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

pay per click marketing is often filled with falsified clicks. Your competition will click on your ads to drive up your pay per click marketing bill in order to try to get you to stop advertising and competing. There have also been some 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 advertising. 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 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 unknowns that can make the one percent number 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 $50.00, and your clicks cost fifty cents each, you cannot afford pay per click marketing because 100 clicks X .50 per click = $50.00 and you only broke even.

Remember, "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 money was really lost. You must know what it costs you to be in business, 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 pay per click advertising has been bid up way too high by the larger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using PPC promotion.

Beware of the companies who will offer to administer your PPC promotion for a fee because they cannot change the laws of math or physics. They will claim that they have the experience to help you, and they might. But they still cannot change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that PPC promotion can work, but you must 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 promotion might work for you.

I recommend that you stick with niche terms that haven't been bid way up. Personally, in my industry I'm only willing to pay between fifteen cents and forty cents maximum per click, and my products sell for between forty and one hundred and fifty dollars.

Pay per click advertising? Do the math first, and then decide. But you should be willing to lose money while you learn how to make it work effectively!

Personally, I've found several search engine optimization techniques that are much more effective than pay per click marketing. These other techniques have led me to advance my website to the top of the organic listings on all of the major search engines for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. A reason that these other methods are much more effective is they cost little or nothing. And most people attribute a lot more credibility to ecommerce sites that rank high in the organic listings versus the paid listings.

By using these methods, in well under one year, I've been able to make my ecommerce website rank as well as other ecommerce sites in my industry that have been promoting themselves 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 have used reciprocal linking trading to promote their website.

However, one-way backlinks are much 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 drive lots of free traffic to my website to make it successful by using article spooling.

Albert Weiss, the author, has described how he gets a lot of free traffic to his website by relying on article spinning and marketing, as well as other effective SEO methods that you can employ yourself for free. Visit his Free SEO Information site to find out who the real SEO Experts are.

Published May 14th, 2007

Filed in Marketing, Technology


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