Online Marketing Articles by Web Profits

Why Pay-Per-Click Advertising ‘Does Not Work’ For Beginners

As an online marketing agency we get a lot of small businesses contacting us to help them make money on the Internet. One of the core services we offer is PPC setup and management, with a focus on Google Adwords. Yet one of the most common statements we hear is:

“I’ve already tried pay-per-click advertising and it doesn’t work”

Immediately this sounds warning bells, as PPC advertising is one of the most profitable methods of advertising available (in fact, we’ve been able to generate more than 1,000 sales per day for some companies using PPC advertising).

After further questioning we find out that they have setup a Google Adwords campaign themselves (because Google makes it so easy) and have invested $500 or $1,000 in advertising, only to find that they could not achieve any results… and based on this they say PPC advertising doesn’t work!

Maybe it is because of the common misconception that ‘it is easy to make money online’. We’ve been hearing this for years now, and I admit that was one of the reasons I started in the online game… but I was wrong, even in the very beginning. Now, after many years in the online game I understand why it is difficult to make money online, and why it will become harder in years to come.

When you market on search engines, like Google, you have to be on the first page to be noticed, and that’s where the challenge lies. There are a maximum of 10 paid positions available to the entire country. That means that from all the advertisers in the country, only 10 can hold a first page position. That means that only those advertisers which know what they are doing can afford to compete in a market where the top positions are dominated by clicks of that cost between $2 and $7 per click.

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Using The Google Traffic Estimator

If you are thinking of using Google AdWords to beef up your website’s advertising campaign, take a look at the Google traffic estimator before you make any firm decisions on which keywords to try.

This relatively new tool allows you to try out specific keywords and phrases to see what the likely results would be if you actually tried them for real. You can find out:

• How popular a keyword or phrase is likely to be
• How many times that keyword is typically clicked on per day
• What the average cost per click would be to you
• How many clicks you could expect to get per day, depending on the budget you set

The Google traffic estimator is a useful tool for all website owners, but it is likely to save many novice owners from making expensive mistakes with their advertising budget. A key point to remember is to put a price on what you are prepared to pay per click. You can then find out where that puts you in the grand scheme of things – Google might estimate that there are ten other people who are prepared to pay more than you, and so they will tell you roughly how many times your keywords will be clicked on each day.

Obviously the more popular the keyword or phrase is, the more you can expect to pay for each click. A neat trick for competing with high demand keywords - such as ‘credit card’, for example - is to narrow your focus; try something like ‘credit card rewards’ instead. Getting traffic to your website is one thing, but getting highly targeted traffic is far better as these people will be far more likely to buy from you.

Experiment with using the Google traffic estimator to find more carefully targeted phrases to use in your ads and on your website. You can test any number of targeted phrases (within quote marks) without it costing you a thing. This will help ensure your website is optimised to rank as highly as possible in the search engines. In this sense, the Google traffic estimator can benefit you in two ways:

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Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Wars… Yahoo! vs. Google?

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has been the most profitable revenue stream for search engines, with Google and Yahoo! generating multi-billions of dollars every single quarter… and growing!

For the quarter ended June 30, 2006, Google reported recorded revenues of $2.46 billion, an increase of 77% compared to the same time just one year ago!

In 2003 Google’s arch nemesis, Yahoo!, bought Overture, the pay-per-click service, in an attempt to capture a share of the huge advertising dollar spent on pay-per-click advertising every year.

Since its purchase, the Overture system remained unchanged for more than 3 years, until now…

The massive profits earned by Google has obviously made Yahoo! stand up and take notice… more importantly it has forced Yahoo! to take a serious look at their current PPC services, now re-branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing, and improve their service offering so they can compete on the same playing field as Google.

Some of the biggest benefits that Google had over Yahoo! Search Marketing were:

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