What is pay per click? It’s neither cheap nor easy:
I promise this will be a short article, mainly because I am not very experienced with pay per click and it is also too detailed a topic to be explained in one article. At the basic level, PPC is where you pay a search engine directly for traffic that has searched for a specific keyword, the only difference between PPC and SEO is that you pay, these are the same visitors. who are looking for the same things. I guess there is another really crucial difference and that is that you can lose money with PPC in a way that you can’t with just organic rankings. When I say you can lose money, I mean you can buy that traffic for any keyword, but there’s no guarantee that the traffic will turn into sales, it’s a risky business.
So it might seem pretty straightforward so far, that is, all you have to do is donate money to Google and they’ll show your ad in search results, but this is not that easy. For starters, there are a few mysterious formulas that determine the amount of each click on your ad. Google evaluates the quality of your site and your account history to determine how much they want to charge you (I told you that was weird). Another big headache is picking the right keywords because if you pick the wrong one (doesn’t turn into sales) you are going to lose money. Also keep in mind that in order to do a proper test to see if a keyword is profitable you will have to stick with it for a while, I have heard it averaged £ 400 before you can call it a day. .
As far as I know, there are two basic forms of PPC for making money that marketers use. The first is where you sell something online directly to people and you want to increase both sales and brand awareness for your store. The second method is for internet marketers to create landing pages for offers provided by affiliates i.e. not actually selling the product that they are just passing you on. I guess the second method sounds simple enough, but the reality is that finding traffic that converts can be very difficult and also expensive if there is a lot of competition. However, I firmly believe that when it comes to income, the best affiliate marketers who work with PPC are the ones who make the most money on the web. I’ve heard stories of PPC gurus earning over £ 500,000 on a single offer!
A common theme that I see with all PPC users is that they are addicted to statistics! You see that the pay per click margins can be very close, quite often people rely on the scale to make money. For example, if you have a campaign where you spend:
75p per click X 10,000 clicks = £ 7,500
5% conversion rate = 50 sales
The commission per sale must be £ 150 + before making a profit.
As you can see there are some scary numbers, the most important is your conversion rate. Even a 1% to 2% swing can be the difference between a profit and a loss.
I guess it’s the ‘loss’ factor that has kept me from getting into PPC gaming, with organic marketing so far, the most I can waste is my own time, and even if that is valuable too, i can live with it. So that’s all I have on pay per click for now, let me know if any of you are successful or considering giving it a try.