Pay Per Click (PPC)

Just wondered how may here on the forum use PPC for their websites and how successful they find it?

I use it a lot and like all the web marketing it is also a bit of an art to get right!

Do you do well for your investment or does it just burn your budget?

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Google adwords, love it, rave about it, swear by it

Used it for years, and have consiently good success with it, but have just recently been challenged by an adwords outsourcer that they can tweak our campaign further, absorb the management fee into our normal spend, and give us a better ROI.

Was very cynical, as we get approached all the time, but eventually agreed, and to be fair, they are currently delivering.

They have reduced our actual clicks, making them more targetted, and we are holding at just over 40% for conversion rate, which I can't complain at.

Company is broadplace.com, we've been using them now for nearly 3 months, so still early days, but so far so good.

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Steve

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Have used PPC for years on websites I have managed. When I started, back in the day, the Yahoo! platform was known as GoTo, Espotting did well and Google were not the market leaders!

Only had one fail really with PPC but that was mainly due to the type of service not having a great revenue stream to maintain a decent ROI (free horoscopes sign up) even though the CPC was very cheap and the conversion rate high.

And I agree, getting PPC right is an art form that comes with experience and know-how.

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Pay Per Click is quite expensive, and it depends on the key words too. I discovered that the weight of the key word determines the bid cost. IT is good to generate traffic for a new website but I do believe in good content, optimisation of website, and free directories all these help to generate traffic.

AloeForBeauty

I disagree completely, you should never use adwords just to generate traffic. Thats just a quick route to burning good money. If you want general traffic, then write some content and optimise your site and get some organic traffic.

PPC is for a specific purpose, ie you are you are paying for highly targeted traffic to acheive a particular goal, ie a sale, conversion, sign up or whatever.

Used properly, adwords is an incredible marketing tool, which can be fully tracked from initial click to conclusion. No other form of marketing offers such control and power over a campaign.

It can take time to master, but tweak, test and tune until its performing how you want, and then you continue tuning!

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Steve

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I agree in the main with Steve, have used PPC for years and had mixed results on the whole. Main reason for mixed rather than all positive is the product set at previous companies. I just dont think PPC is the right medium for businesses that make transactional based sales. i.e. if you sell laptops forget it unless you are ebuyer. It takes for to many clicks to generate a sale regardless of how good the site is as it is totally price led. You make £50 on a sale and it takes £55 to generate the sale.

PPC works well for service based businesses, in other words, residual income models where you make a sale to 1 client and keep getting paid, such as services.

Interestingly, we have started using Bing and in only a short time, are thinking about stopping PPC on google completely because of the following stats over the last week on the same ad groups and keywords:

Clicks - Bing 67 Google 160
Ave CPC - Bing 0.41p Google 0.79p
Bounce rate - Bing 22.48% Google 70.48%
Aver pages per visit - Bing 4.7 Google 2.1
Convertions - Bing 27.4% Google 1.1%
Average add position - Bing 1.87 Google 3.78

If this trend continues we will be swapping the google budget to Bing. I dont care how many clicks I get that just burns money. The figures dont lie the quality of visiter we get from Bing is 10 times that of google and the competition for the same keywords dramatically less. e.g. one of our core services, Hosted Exchange, for the budget we have cant even get onto first page on google, yet we average position 1.4 on bing with a lower budget.

Didn't plan the essay guys but good points are well made

Phil

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PPC isn't expensive if a) your keywords are targeted correctly and the right Adtext is used. b) the landing page you are sending the user to is engaging to that user, takes them directly to what they have searched for and has plenty of information about the product or service you offer and the content on the page is unique.
PPC only becomes expensive when you have a low ROI. I have refused to set up PPC accounts for some websites/companies as it clear from the quality of the website and it's content that PPC is not going to work for them and WILL be expensive.

I don't totally agree with this comment. If you "drill" down in the keyword/phrase choice transactional product sites can do well with PPC. For example:
Keyword: laptops - will attract users who are browsing for a laptop but haven't committed to buy as they have no idea what they want.
Keyword: Sony laptop - the user has identified they want a Sony laptop but have not fully committed in their mine which one they prefer so are still browsing
Keyword: Sony (model type) laptop - the user has totally identified which laptop they want and are in the mindset of a purchaser.

I always advice companies NOT to dismiss the other PPC engines. You might not get the volume of users/clicks that can be achieved via Google but the ROI can be much, much better. So pleased you are finding this too

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It also depends on what you are wanting to acheive, and fair point it will be more effective for different businesses, but for us, our main adwords campaign is for free listings. Using the freemium model, we then need to convert a percentage to be cost effective.

But we also get direct sales from PPC, and I agree with MagnifyB, to convert, your ad has to target a purchaser not a browser.

I tried a PPC campaign with Bing when it first rebranded. Costs were much cheaper than google, conversion was better, but volume was very low, to the point of making it a waste of time.

With all the recent hype and media, and watching Bings organic traffic growth in my analytics, it may be time to give it another go

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Steve

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Bing are offering a free trial is anyone is intersted.

https://www.tryadcenternow.co.uk/

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Thanks for recommending this company broadplace.com, I will definitely get in touch with them .

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