Is pay-per-click getting too expensive?
For a business marketing their products and services, either to other businesses or direct to consumers, I fail to see how many are getting value from Adwords and pay-per-click.
I set up some local campaigns for a company this week, ie. “[service] Hampshire”, etc. It’s quite a specific set of key phrases I’ve chosen and the adverts and landing pages are optimised. One of phrases, even with a click bid of 80p, is rated as position 20.8.
You’ve got to have a high value product to make that pay.
I used to run Adwords on the beauty shop. In January, is cost me £220.61 to deliver £255.46 worth of sales. That, is unsustainable. I turned them off and despite the lower level of sales, my profits have inevitably risen.
Google must be laughing and many businesses, I can only surmise, simply don’t get it.
Comment by Garri February 6, 2008 @ 11:43 pm
Although I don’t display Adsense on my site I would like to start using Adwords but don’t know where to start, other than visiting Google itself
The only time I’ve ever used Adwords was when I used to run my record label and it was a waste of time because I was number 1 in the organic results for the bands I had anyway, so it was poor value.
In my new life I’m in a far more keyword competitive field but the tagging of content is yielding higher traffic these days.
Comment by Craig Killick February 7, 2008 @ 12:00 am
I agree Garri, much better to move budget from Adwords into quality content generation. This also makes it much more sustainable rather than a short burst. I wrote a bit about this the other week:
http://blog.the-escape.co.uk/2008/01/28/the-online-content-vs-advertising-curve/
Comment by Garri February 7, 2008 @ 10:56 am
Just read your article and though you say it’s corny it’s so true! I’m into the 3rd year of my main project and although it hasn’t been s storming economic success (that wasn’t the immediate objective) I have learned SO much and now have a feel for the ‘market’. That knowledge has identified some niches that are waiting to be filled, and boy will they be filled
But I’d still like to experiment with Adwords. I haven’t yet because a) I’m not sure what I want to sell and how I want to sell it and b) the landing CTA pages aren’t ready yet.
Comment by Joel February 26, 2008 @ 2:18 am
I think pay per click is on its way out. Thats why I started tagsoda.com
Its tagging software for ecommerce products. Check it out and let me know what you think.
http://www.tagsoda.com/search/why_pay_per_sale/
thanks
joel
Comment by Anthony Buchalka May 13, 2008 @ 10:59 am
Hi,
An important consideration regarding awdords pay per click costs, is worrking out the ‘lifetime value’ of a customer.
Many customers, if looked after well, will purchase other products and services from us later on and that therefore allows us to pay a higher cost per click in the beginning.
If only 1 product or service is sold, it can be difficult to make adwords profitable.
best regards,