The Pay Per Click DebateUsing pay per click (PPC) has become a controversial subject in recent years. We keep hearing stories confirming that it doesn’t work, it’s become too expensive, it was fine in the old days etc. etc. After hearing all of those negative comments that abound in chat rooms and forums you can be forgiven for being frightened to use it. We have achieved some stunning results using PPC to boost sales of products that we market and consequently decided to do a little digging in an attempt to portray a balanced argument in this article. The first test we did was to go through our files of internet marketing offers and trace them back to which we found through PPC ads and which we found through natural search methods. For this test we used 150 search items and were shocked to discover that 126 were found by following PPC ads. This is around 84% of purchases made by us in the past two years were made by following PPC ads. Next we made a chart of the people we actually bought from via pay per click ads and found that the majority are well known internet marketers or gurus as many people refer to them as. This indicates that many of the truly top internet marketers use PPC. As you know from previous articles we have published we are great believers in copying the methods of successful people. Be honest; it’s far better than following the methods of failures isn’t it? [Sideline: This is just for readers with a sense of humor. One item we purchased via a PPC link was an eBook written by a top marketer describing a method of drawing buyers without resorting to PPC] We then asked a few co-workers if the could find a site that sold a certain product and watched over their shoulders while they searched for a suitable site. Out of 7 people who all started with a Google search for the product we were seeking 6 of them came to the Google front page for that keyword and then went directly to a PPC ad. This means that just 1 out of our seven chosen searchers looked for a non pay site. Again this is a percentage of around 85%. We understand that a test with just 7 people is not representative and suggest you carry out your own test using friends and relatives. If more than 50% go direct to PPC then it shows a trend worth following. Using our stats that indicate 84% of purchases were made via PPC ads and 85% of searchers went directly to the same it indicates that if you don’t consider this system you have your marketing head buried in the sand and are ignoring sources of good online income. I’m sure if I ask the question: “Would you spend $100 to make $300?” The majority of people would hold up their hand and reply: “Naturally I would.” So why the bad stories around the chat rooms and forums if most of the top marketers use it? Here we can only hazard a guess based upon experience, that most newcomers to internet marketing start campaigns with the best of intentions but fail to maintain control over them. Imagine you decide to use 100 keywords that you bid for it is reasonable to assume that only about 10 will be profitable but that doesn’t mean that people do not click on the non-profitable keywords but do not buy. You still have to pay for all clicks, not just the successful ones. Based upon this fact it is easy to see why so many people find pay per click too expensive; now we must find the answer. We found a single piece of software that enabled us to track our campaigns very closely and discard any keywords that were proving unprofitable before they cost us very much money. We still use this software with every campaign we run and would be lost without it. PPC Oracle has become our bible for running successful pay per click campaigns and we recommend it to anybody who is serious about making income online. It paid for itself in the first campaign and has continued to do so ever since.
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