Should you Pay Per Click?
Commonly refered to as PPC among the savy internet marketers. If you have been marketing online for any length of time you have probably seen PPC eat up your advertising dollars with little or no results.
You research and choose the hottest keywords, then burn through your daily budget in an hour with no sales. The myth that mega traffic produces mega profits is just that. A myth.
Traffic is great. Traffic improves your search engine ranking. It increases word of mouth advertising. Traffic gets you more traffic, but when you are paying a pretty penny for each and every click you want sales.
You may remember the class action law suit against Google. A group of businesses sued Google claiming the company didn't do enough to prevent click fraud so they lost money in their PPC campaigns.
In my less than humble opinion, click fraud was not the culprit. For those who don't know, click fraud is when someone who publishes Google Adsense ads clicks on ads on their own sight to make money with no intention of purchasing the product advertised.
As I said, in my opinion click fraud was not the culprit. It was badly chosen keyword phrases. Instructions on how to choose and bid on keyword phrases are available on the PPC sites so I won't go into the mechanics of bidding.
The important thing is, if you chose the most popular keyword your ad will show up in hundreds maybe even thousands of searches an hour. This means you will recieve hundreds maybe even thousands of clicks a day.
Mega traffic right? For instants. If you are selling hand painted porceliain piggy banks and you bid on the keyword "bank". Who will see your ad and possibly click on it? People looking for online banking, people looking for a rock band called "Bank", kids writing a report for school on the bankiong industry. In other words, people who don't want what you are selling.
They will click on your ad without reading the whole thing and go "This isn't what I want." and hit the back button. Remember, it cost you money for them to click. It costs them nothing, so people aren't careful about what they click on.
Choose your phrase carefully. You want clicks from visitors who are looking to buy what you are selling. Target your phrase. Bid on "porceliain hand painted piggy banks" if that is what you are selling. People who do broad searches are just looking. People who target their searches are looking to buy.
Will you get less traffic? Yes. Will you make more sales? Maybe, depending on your product, how easy your site is to navigate, your prices, etc, etc...
The point is, with PPC, looky loos cost you money. Save the most popular keywords for your free traffic sources. Target your PPC so that only credit card in hand buyers click your ads.