| |
| |
|
PPC & Advertising Information |
|
|
|
Pay Per Click or Pay Per Human Browser?
Pay Per Click advertising has been around a few years now. Pay per click is a multi million dollar industry which, as yet, is still in its infancy. There is no telling how big PPC will become in the future, but there are certainly many young players in the business, and new PPC search engines appearing all the time. Should we use the smaller PPC search engines? Should we use PPC advertising at all? Is Pay Per Click Advertising a Valuable Tool? From a personal point of view, the answer to that is a simple "yes". Quite simply, I have used pay per click advertising since 2003, and have got some excellent results. Those results have been mixed, of course, with some very bad results too. But that's advertising for you, online or offline. You try, you test, you monitor, you experiment, all the time aiming to get better and better results. The basic advantage of pay per click is built into its name. Your ad will cost you nothing, except when somebody clicks on it to go to your website. Imagine being able to do that in the offline world: place an ad in a glossy magazine, and only pay each time somebody sends for a brochure or calls your sales hotline. I used to sell advertising in glossy magazines. Advertisers can spend $3000 on an ad and get no response. A small business can spend $500 on an ad and get no response, really hurting their business cash flow in the process. In principle, pay per click is a wonderful idea, but the real problem is in the quality, and the quality can be watered down so easily by fraud. Remember, you are paying for a click. That click could be automated, it could be a genuine person looking for a product like yours, or it could be someone clicking because they are being paid to click. Pay per click advertising is a valuable tool, but you need to monitor with care. Is 9 Cents Per Click Cheaper Than 1 Cent Per Click? My first use of pay per click advertising was with Google Adwords, followed a month or two later by Overture. I have always liked Google Adwords, and it is still my favourite today. It combines high quality clicks, with ease of use and a comprehensive amount of useful management information to help your campaigns. To me, it is way above the others, including Overture. Once I had campaigns set up at Overture and Adwords I let them run, and it was quite a few months before I started to research the smaller PPC companies. Many of the newer entrants in the field offer tempting starting credits and bids as low as 1 cent per click. I must admit, a year ago I was quite excited about getting loads of clicks at a cent a time. The old saying "you get what you pay for" did not enter my head at the beginning, but it soon came to mind as I saw those 1 cent payments rocket. I tried several of the newer PPC search engines, but two in particular just zipped through my funds, and unlike Google Adwords, you could not set a daily budget. I decided to take a closer look at my website stats to see what was happening to those 1 cent clicks. What I did was compare one of the new PPC search engines I was using, with Google Adwords. The comparison was based on whether a visitor to the landing page immediately exited again, or whether they browsed other pages on the site. The landing pages were identical. I already knew Google Adwords provided genuine visitors, as I first used them for a real estate website, and the ads led to sales; big money for small outlay. In effect, I was using Adwords as my proven control. The results of the comparison were very convincing. Over a one month period the following happened: 1. From small PPC X, 1187 entered the landing page and 1165 of those exited the site from the same page. That's 98 % were a quick in and out. 2. From Google Adwords, 161 entered the landing page, of whom only 44 exited from the same page. That's 27% were a quick in and out. As you can see, only 2% of the "X" visitors bothered looking around the website. If I had got the same result from Google, then I could just say it was because it was a lousy landing page. But I did not. 73% of the Google visitors went on to have a good look around the website, that's 36 times better. So, what do we make of these figures? I used the same keywords for "X" and Google, so I should have had similar results. I have to conclude that "X" was sending very poor quality traffic, Google it's usual high standard. I then worked out the more realistic cost per browser ie the cost of each visitor who stayed at the website and looked around. With "X" I was paying 1 cent per click, and with Google an average 9 cents per click. You will see from the following table the cost per browser for Google worked out much cheaper than "X", less than 1 quarter the price in fact: 1. The 22 people who stayed on the website to browse from "X" cost $11.87, or $0.54 per browser. 1. The 117 people who stayed on the website to browse from Google cost $14.49, or $0.12 per browser. On the surface, it might always seem the smaller search engines are cheaper. However, it is wise to monitor the reality. If you want real visitors to your website, ensure that is what you are getting. Would you rather pay 12 cents for a genuine visitor or 54 cents? These results are, of course, from one test. You may get different results. I think the lesson here is to monitor very closely what is happening with your paid for clicks. Cheap may mean expensive; expensive may mean cheap but good value. All is not what it seems when you compare prices of Pay Per Click search engines. Roy Thomsitt is the owner, webmaster and author of http://www.change-direction.com, a new website in late 2004, about working online in a home based business. He has a background in offline advertising, with practical experience of working from home in marketing since 1995, plus 2 years of experience with online marketing. He has a substantial background in financial and project management, implementing new office, accounting, computer and management systems. He is an English expat, now resident in the Philippines.
MORE RESOURCES:
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
PPC Management: When To Give Up On A Loser Pay per click (PPC) advertising can be a dream come true. You can get traffic almost immediately from some PPC search engines. Organic Natural Search Engine Optimization versus Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising When you purchase visitors or "clicks" from a search engine, this is called "pay-per-click" (PPC) search engine advertising (or PPCSE). Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising allows you to quickly get top search engine placement by "bidding" (paying) for keywords related to your product or service. What is Google AdSense? AdSense may be one of the fastest and easiest ways to monetize traffic to your web site whether you have products or services for sale or you simply provide free content to your visitors.Simply stated, Google AdSense enables website operators to place some code on their site that connects to Google's ad server content database and pulls keyword-relevant advertising onto the web pages. Keyword Prices Decline 3.0% in the First Quarter of 2005 An analysis of web's most popular 20,000 keywords by TopPayingKeywords.com, found that keyword prices dropped 3. How To Write Little Tiny AdWords Ads That Bring Giant-Sized Profits It seems to be a phenomenon. You try Google AdWords Select, your ad gets "disapproved" by the powers that be at Google, you count your losses and give up. The Truth About Pay-Per-Click Ads Are pay-per-click ads the best method of getting customers to your website?Essentially there are two ways your website can get to the top of a search engine's results:* Pay-per-click ads, where you pay for your site to appear in the "Sponsored Links" area on the right side of the results page* Search engine optimization, where your site is optimized to be at the top of the natural/organic results on the left side of the results page (link to our SEO page)JupiterResearch analyst Niki Scevak stated that one in seven searchers click on a paid/sponsored link. If you do the math, that's only 14% of searchers who are choosing the pay-per-click ads to get to the information they are searching for. 5 Top Tips for Maximizing Your Adsense Profits 1: The ideal Google AdSense page should have great content about a very specific topic. Take pains to be very clear about what the topic is, and carefully choose the keyword (or key phrase) describing the topic. How to Quickly Create an Adsense Site That Brings In the Bucks One of the hottest crazes for online marketers is Adsense sites. These marketers trade in information and build sites that are tightly focused around one small niche. Adsense Secrets Pst! Wanna know some Adsense secrets? The only secret is that there are no secrets per se!Do a search for Adsense secrets and you will be bombarded by a myriad of ads by trying to sell you the answers to making lots of money with Adsense.Before you buy anything, my advise to you would be to do some research on a search engine and a bit of common sense. Pay Per Click Search Engines - A Fundamental Overview Forbes magazine reported that pay per click ads accounted for $1.4 billion in 2002 and are expected to increase to $8 billion by 2008. What Should You Know About Search Engines and Pay-Per-Click? Here's a fact for you, 85 to 95% of Websites are found through a search engine. You may have the most incredible Website on the Internet, but it will receive little or no traffic without search engine visibility and ranking. Internet Advertising Options Your online business will likely require more advertising than a contemporary business downtown, yet some new to the world of online business do not spend the time and money to advertise their business appropriately and are, in turn, losing money. Your online business is crammed into the world wide web along with thousands of others selling the same product or service as yourself. 3 Strategies to Profit When Click Prices Increase (Part 2 of 3 Series) What are Website Conversion Strategies?Website conversion strategies are marketing and technology efforts focused on increasing your website's efficiency with turning visitors into prospects or customers. The majority of website conversion strategies involve redesigning your current website and re-writing your website's copy. AdWords Campaign Set Up Tips It's easy to overlook the basics of a strong AdWords campaign. Without them though, your AdWords campaign can be doomed from the very start. Google for Resellers: Leveling the Resell Playing Field With so many people trying to make money on the web and so many products being sold with resell and master resell rights, it's a wonder anyone can make any money at all at it!Indeed, most people don't.Why?Sometimes it's because people get in on the tail end of the product being sold and start trying to resell it just as the original creator decides to start giving it away for free. How to Save Money on the Adwords Network Over the years I have had many accounts with Adwords, spending a small fortune with the Adwords service. So naturally I have picked up many cost saving tricks. Googles AdSense Soon To Have New Rival? A large part of Google's multi-billion dollar annual turnover comes from its nifty AdSense advertising program. The software enables website owners to drop in a piece of code to their pages that then serves advertisements provided by Google. Profiting From Second Tier Pay Per Click Search Engines Once you venture into the world of Pay Per Click advertising, you'll soon discover that the marketplace is sharply divided between tier 1 Search Engines (Google and Overture), and everyone else. While it's difficult to imagine a comprehensive, successful Pay Per Click Advertising campaign that doesn't include the major players, companies that limit themselves to Google and Overture may be missing out on profitable traffic. How To Increase Adsense Income If you are already running Adsense on your site, you are probably thinking of ways to increase your Adsense income.If your Adsense is performing poorly, I have two tips for you:1. 6 Easy Ways to Increase Your Adsense Revenue How much revenue do you generate from Google Adsense?Recently there has been a lot of discussion about people who earn over $10,000 a month just from Adsense. Furthermore, there are rumors of a few individuals who earn over $1 million a year just from using the power of Google advertisements.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2006 |
