ZydoSEO - 3:48 pm on Dec 2, 2009 (gmt 0)

PPC is a complex beast. 99% of the companies that participate in Adwords and other PPC programs have no clue what they are doing and end up pissing away a LOT of money with very little results. So they then turn it over to some agency to manage on their behalf and pay the agency 10%, 15%, 20% of their total spend in fees which makes it less profitable. And the agency in an effort to make more money then tries to convince you to spend more since that is the only way they can increase their paycheck. Them making your campaigns more "efficient" actually leads to less spend which means less profits from them. So where's the motivation really.

PPC is something that you have to lose at for a while... refine... refine... refine... by continually optimizing landing pages, doing multi-variant testing, testing ad text, etc. until you find the right combo that makes $$$. Finding the right combination of adtext (not just the words in the ad, but things like capitalization of letters and URL displayed in the ad) and landing page takes time. And once you find the right combination, you can't simply put it on autopilot. You have to monitor it, because what works today may not work tomorrow. PPC algorithms at Google and other places are constantly changing much like SEO ranking algorithms.

And stopping your campaigns for months at the time and restarting later is not such a good idea IMO. It creates long gaps in your click-thru history which means you're likely starting over each time you restart trying to build up quality scores so that your CPAs will go down. You should decide to be in or be out and stick with your decision.

PPC "can" be very profitable depending on the niche and the amount of time/effort you put into optimizing it. But don't expect ever to simply jump in and win at it. The people in those #1, #2, #3 positions likely pay far less per click than you would have to pay in order to obtain those same positions because they have better quality scores.