Not long ago it was very easy to profit from pay-per-click advertising. In fact, I used to spend 99% of my advertising budget on pay-per-click search engine advertising since it was so easy just to post up an ad, add funds to one of the popular pay-per-click providers and sit back and watch the orders food in. It was that easy. Using simple tracking software the source for each sale could be determined. It was then a simple calculation to determine how much I could bid on popular keywords, by dividing the gross amount in sales by the number of visitors to my website. This scientific marketing approach produced a real healthy return on my investment. So I continued to top-up my pay-per-click account and watch my profits grow! Slowly, over time my results began to change...for the worse! More and more advertisers began to take advantage of the clear benefits of advertising online, being able to reach targeted niche markets quickly and easily. With the increase in competition for popular keywords came higher and higher bids, with each advertiser striving for the exclusive pole position. The end result was a bidding war! Gradually, those popular keyword terms that used to bring in huge chunks of profit, were just too expensive. The cost of pay-per-click advertising started to overtake the actual sales achieved and lowering the bid simply didn't bring the amount of traffic that was needed. 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 new product I decided to 'err on the side of caution' and test my advertising campaign with a few different pay per click traffic providers before committing my budget to just one popular source. 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 The first was the most popular of the PPC systems - Google Adwords The second was another fairly popular source of pay-per-click traffic - Kanoodle at http://www.kanoodle.com Finally, I tested a new kind of traffic source - Have Traffic at http://www.havetraffic.com. This isn't a pay-per-click search engine but it is a type of PPC advertising. They say that their traffic achieved through a network of related sites instead of a direct result from a search engine. Here are my results.... Google's traffic was the most expensive at 45 cents per click for the list of targeted keywords that I chose. They delivered a total of 449 visitors to my web site for my $200 investment. I got one sale and 20 sign-ups to my newsletter. So the sign-up conversion rate was 4.4% and my return on investment was 43% Kanoodle provided much more traffic for my dollars. 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....not good! Have Traffic was the real surprise package. I received 1,000 visitors for my $200 and actually received 3 sales and 46 subscribers to my newsletter. The actual return on my investment was a 135% plus I received 46 leads with which to follow-up Just one of the campaigns broke even and that one only earned 135% ROI. I'm sure that if I optimize everything a little better then Google and Have traffic would provide a profitable return on my investment. It really seems that Kanoodle is a bust no matter what I do. Its a pity. 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 freelancer 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 |