Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) has had a pretty good press these last few years. Google has become one of the world’s most admired companies on the back of its sponsored search and Adwords revenues. Fees earned from visitors clicking through ads on their sites has become the most important revenue source for many content providers, including giants like Facebook and Youtube. Armies of individuals have created content (like this article) in the hope of taking a tiny slice of the huge PPC pie, which is estimated to reach $60 billion globally in 2010.
But does this burgeoning PPC spend really pay for the advertisers? The short answer has to be “yes” because such growth would not have occurred without the bulk of the spending generating profitable results. However if you’re planning to spend on PPC perhaps you might want to look at some potential downsides:
1. Variable and skewed traffic
Most people never click on internet ads. Estimates vary but it seems that 70-85% rarely if ever respond to internet advertising so the traffic you do receive from PPC is obviously skewed to a certain segment of the population. This may not matter if you are getting profitable sales from acceptably priced traffic but it is at least worth considering if you find that you are attracting the wrong kind of visitor (such as non-buying ones) to your site. It is also an argument for not putting all your eggs in the PPC basket as you are missing the bulk of your potential market.
2. Brand and credibility issues
Being “no 1 on Google” carries a certain cache, though it does not take an internet marketer to know there is a big difference between being top for a competitive term (“restaurant New York”) and an obscure one (“Bulgarian restaurant New York”). But by the same token, it is also true that paying to put your name, brand or site in front of internet eyeballs can sometimes look like an admission of failure or, worse, spammy and amateurish. If you begin an Adwords campaign for your blue chip investment advisory service do you want to end up just below an ad touting 1000% returns for penny stock tips?
3. What about “nonliners”?
If you spend a large amount of your marketing budget on PPC you are missing a large part of your potential audience. We have already talked about the majority of surfers who do not click on paid results or banners, but what about “nonliners” who do not use the internet or do so but not when searching for your product or service? At least if your internet marketing strategy is mainly “organic” (non-paid) then you may have money left over for offline marketing.
4. Failure to convert
If you think PPC is a lazy and easy way to make money online then you can forget it. Anyone in the industry will tell you that attracting traffic is only part of the battle; you can quickly lose a lot of money paying for clicks through to bad internet sites or “landing pages” which do not convert clicks to profits. Try an experiment for yourself, typing in a relevant search term and clicking through the sponsored results. You will quite often be led to boring, low impact homepages with no sales pitch or “call to action” (in marketing speak), or pages with limited relevance to your search term or even to broken links. If you spend money on PPC you still have to invest time and thought in developing effective landing pages and arresting site content.
5. Click fraud
One of the great advantages of PPC is that everyone clicking through has had their interest piqued by your ad and therefore is a potential customer. But what if you are paying for clicks made by competitors trying to undermine your campaign or online marketers generating phony clicks to make money? This is a growing problem and even though there are controls and protective measures that Google and others take, this can be an expensive pitfall for the unfortunate or unwary.
Related Posts :
“3 Reasons why pay-per-click ads (PPC) are a waste of time and money” By C.S. Thompson – Intern ...
This is the first article of a 2-part series. Google is the leading Internet company. It’s reven ...
Most SEO companies can provide a number of monthly management plans for clients and customers w ...
If you want to make money promoting products or services using AdWords, there’s a right and wro ...
The expenses of a network marketing business can overwhelm a distributor. This is one of the ma ...
Related posts:
- Pay Per Click Advertising Keep your searc & content Ads Separate or You ll Lose Money
- Are There Frauds In Pay Per Click Advertising
- How Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest growing sources of online advertising
- Pay Per Click Advertising
- Pay per Click Advertising Not as Scary as You Think
- Pay Per Click Advertising Demystified
- The benefits of Pay Per Click advertising against traditional advertising methods
- Top Google Adwords Strategies to Help you Make More Money With Pay Per Click Advertising
- Web Traffic Is Article Marketing Better Than Pay Per Click Advertising
- Pay Per Click Advertising Know Who Views your Ads
