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Can you still make a profit from pay-per-click advertising?
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 make sure that I was gaining a profit, I tracked my campaign so that I could check exactly the number of visitors to my site. I could then make a calculation to determine my highest possible bid for a particular keyword by dividing the gross income in sales by the number of visitors. The result was the maximum I could bid without losing money.
It was scientific marketing that produced a real return on my investment
Slowly, over time my results began to change...for the worse! More and more advertisers began to take advantage of the clear benefits of advertising online, being able to reach targeted niche markets quickly and easily. With the increase in competition for popular keywords came higher and higher bids, with each advertiser striving for the exclusive pole position. The end result was 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' .
The first was the most popular of the PPC systems - Google Adwords
The second was another fairly popular source of pay-per-click 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 actually a PPC search engine. It is a form of advertising known as "contextual advertising". My ads were shown on a network of sites instead of as the result of search on 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%
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!
Surprisingly Have Traffic produced the best overall results
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
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 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 at unexpected sources for your traffic. It's necessary to optimize your ad copy quite a bit more that was required 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 writer 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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