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Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising Still
Profitable?
Until fairly recently, I used to find it real easy to
make a healthy profit from pay-per-click advertising.
In fact, I never even considered any other form of
advertising. It was so easy just to knock-up a simple ad,
add funds to my account with a popular pay-per-click search
engine, choose a bundle of popular related keywords and
then sit back and wait for the sales to come in!
It was that easy.
To determine how much I could spend on my campaign and to
calculate my maximum bid, I would use tracking software to
discover the source of my sales and then simply divide the
gross amount achieved by the number of visitors to my site.
This basic scientific marketing produced a real healthy
return on my investment.
However, over time the results gradually began to change...
More and more advertisers started to see the clear benefits
in pay-per-click advertising over offline methods. There
was more competition for those popular key word terms
resulting in higher bids to achieve the exclusive pole
position...ending in a bidding war!
As the bids increased, the popular keyword terms that
previously brought in huge profits started to be come too
expensive. The actual cost of achieving a reasonably
high position to attract the customer's attention began
to take over the amount that was achieved in sales.
If I lowered the bid amount, as to make the campaign
profitable, the amount of traffic that was delivered was
simply not enough to make the campaign worthwhile.
So this was my position regarding pay-per-click advertising
up to a few weeks ago. If you are an online advertiser who
has used pay-per-click advertising over the last couple of
years or so, then my experience will probably sound very
familiar to you..
So when I released my latest ebook, as you can imagine, I
was a little wary of committing all my advertising to one
popular pay-per-click source. I needed to promote my
product but at the same time I didn't need to simply throw
money away for the sake of getting a listing in the search
engine results.
Instead, I decided to perform a comparison test between a
few providers to test the market. My starting budget was
$200 committed to 3 different traffic sources promoting my
latest ebook product 'Cash From Your Camera'
http://www.cashfromyourcamera.com
The first was the most popular of the pay-per-click system
of advertising - Google Adwords
The second was another fairly popular source of PPC traffic
- Kanoodle at http://www.kanoodle.com
Finally, I tested a new and different kind of traffic
source - Have Traffic at
http://www.havetraffic.com.
Actually, this isn't a pay-per-click search engine but it
is a kind of PPC advertising. The traffic is achieved
through a network of related sites instead of a direct
result from a search engine query.
The results....
Google's traffic was the most expensive at 45 cents per
click for the list of targeted keywords that I chose.
They delivered a total of 449 visitors to my web site for
my $200 investment. I got one sale and 20 sign-ups to my
newsletter. So the sign-up conversion rate was 4.4% and my
return on investment was 43%
Kanoodle provided much more traffic for my dollars. I
actually received 1523 visitors at around 8 cents a visitor.
Unfortunately, the results were very disappointing. The
campaign did not achieve a single sale and I got only 2
confirmed sign-ups to my newsletter....not good!
Have Traffic was the real surprise package.
I received 1,000 visitors for my $200 and actually received
3 sales and 46 subscribers to my newsletter.
The return on my investment was a 135% plus I received 46
leads with which to follow-up
Just one of the campaigns broke even and that one only
earned 135% ROI. I'm sure that if I optimize everything
a little better then Google and Have traffic would provide
a real profitable return on my investment. Unfortunately
it does appear that Kanoodle is a bust no matter
what I do. Its a shame. In the distant past I could count
on decent traffic from them
I guess that if I had used different keywords then it
may have been possible to achieve different results for
the campaigns
But overall, this test demonstrates that there is a still
a profit to be had in pay-per-click advertising. It's just
a case of looking harder and maybe further at unexpected
sources for your pay per click traffic. It demonstrates to
me that I need to work harder optimizing my adcopy than
was necessary in the past for even those solid, well
known sources of traffic like Google
One of a series of articles by Robert Hartness, successful
freelancer and author of Cash From Your Camera which offers a
step-by-step
guide to those on the threshold of freelance photography
and is illustrated with 40+ published photographs.
Acclaimed as a great reference source for serious
freelancers. Please visit
http://www.cashfromyourcamera.com
for more information
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