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 determine how much I could spend on my campaign and to calculate my maximum bid, I would use tracking software to discover the source of my sales and then simply divide the gross amount achieved by the number of visitors to my site.
This basic scientific marketing produced a real healthy return on my investment.
However, over time my results began to change… unfortunately for the worse! As more and more advertisers took advantage of the fast and easy access to niche markets by ppc advertising, the competition for those popular keywords to gain pole position became more fierce. Everyone wanted to be at the top to gain the most traffic. The result was a bidding war!
The battle to reach the top became detrimental to the advertiser. As the bids increased, these popular terms which previously used to attract large chunks of profit became too expensive. Instead of providing a return on my investment, the campaign began to cost more than the amount that was returned in sales. I tried lowering my bids but the amount of traffic that was delivered rendered my campaign ineffective.
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.
So, I decided to perform a comparison test between 3 different pay-per-click traffic sources with an initial budget of $200 committed to each pay-per-click engine for my latest ebook ‘Cash From Your Camera’ http://www.cashfromyourcamera.com
Firstly, I chose probably the most popular method of pay-per-click advertising – Google Adwords
The second was another fairly popular source of PPC traffic – Kanoodle at http://www.kanoodle.com
Finally, I tested a new and different kind of traffic source – Have Traffic at http://www.havetraffic.com. Actually, this isn’t a pay-per-click search engine but it is a kind of PPC advertising. The traffic is achieved through a network of related sites instead of a direct result from a search engine query.
Here are my results….
Firstly, the Google traffic was the most expensive in terms of cost-per-click for my chosen keywords. I paid on average 45 cents per visitor and received a total of 449 visitors formy $200 investment. I achieved 1 order for my product and 20 sign-ups to my newsletter providing a sign-up conversion rate of 4.4% and a return on my investment of 43%
Kanoodle provided a lot more traffic for my money. 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….very disappointing!
Have Traffic was the real surprise package.
They provide traffic at a flat rate of 20 cents a visitor so I received 1000 visitors for my investment of $200. The traffic returned a total of 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.
If I had used different keywords then it may have been possible to achieve different results for the campaigns
But overall, this test shows that it is still possible to find cost effective pay-per-click advertising. You just have to look harder (sometimes at unexpected sources) and optimize your adcopy quite a bit more than was necessary 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 author 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
