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Robert Hartness
IP: 68.161.237.151 Aug 2, 05 - 11:37 PM |
Can you still make a profit from pay-per-click advertising?
Robert Hartness Can you still make a profit from pay-per-click advertising? Not long ago it was very easy to profit from pay-per-click advertising. In fact, I used to spend 99% of my advertising budget on pay-per-click search engine advertising since it was so easy just to post up an ad, add funds to one of the popular pay-per-click providers and sit back and watch the orders food 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 scientific marketing approach produced a real healthy return on my investment. So I continued to top-up my pay-per-click account and watch my profits grow! 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! Gradually, those popular keyword terms that used to bring in huge chunks of profit, were just too expensive. The cost of pay-per-click advertising started to overtake the actual sales achieved and lowering the bid simply didn't bring the amount of traffic that was needed. 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 I was very cautious this time with my PPC advertising. In the past I wouldn't think twice about investing heavily in a popular ppc search engine campaign, but this time I was determined not to simply throw money away just to gain search engine exposure. So, I decided to perform a comparison test between 3 different pay-per-click traffic sources with an initial budget of $200 committed to each pay-per-click engine for my latest ebook 'Cash From Your Camera' http://www.cashfromyourcamera.com The first was the most popular of the PPC systems - Google Adwords The second was another fairly popular source of PPC traffic - Kanoodle at http://www.kanoodle.com Finally, I tested a new kind of traffic source - Have Traffic at http://www.havetraffic.com. This isn't a pay-per-click search engine but it is a type of PPC advertising. They say that their traffic achieved through a network of related sites instead of a direct result from a search engine. The results.... First, for the Google traffic, my average cost per click was 45 cents for the range of different keywords I was bidding on. I received a total of 449 visitors and 1 order. I also received 20 sign-ups to my newsletter providing a sign-up conversion rate of around 4.4% and ROI of 43% Kanoodles's traffic was disappointing although much cheaper. I actually received 1523 visitors for my $200 investment. This works out at less than 8 cents a visitor for the same keywords. But the campaign resulted in zero sales an only 2 sign-ups to my newsletter...not good! The surprise package was Have Traffic They provide traffic at a flat rate of 20 cents a visitor so I received 1000 visitors for my investment of $200. The traffic returned a total of 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 Only one of my three campaigns even broke even and that one only earned 135% ROI. I obviously need to optimize everything a bit better and then I could at least get a profitable return from both Google and Have Traffic. It really looks like Kanoodle is a bust no matter what I do. It's a shame. In the distant past, I could count on decent traffic from them. I guess it's possible that the results may have been different if I had used different keywords for the campaigns But overall, this test shows that it is still possible to find cost effective pay-per-click advertising. You just have to look harder (sometimes at unexpected sources) and optimize your adcopy quite a bit more than was necessary in the past for even solid known good sources of traffic like Google. One of a series of articles by Robert Hartness, successful freelance photographer 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. For More information please visit http://www.cashfromyourcamera.com |
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