Sponsored Links

are these worth it - how much fraud

[Gareth Parkin]

Last year we spend circa 70 thousand pounds on sponsored links with adwords, espotting and overture. Does anyone have any idea of the fraud rate if any on these and also how many people actually use these or if I managed to get natural listings of 1-3 say would this be just as good!

[sem4u]

Do you actually track your ROI from your pay per click adverts? That is the first thing I would look at.

[Gareth Parkin]

Hm - not sure what you mean - all I know is that from the money we spend say on a particual ad for mugs our mug sales out weigh the costs of the ads.
Our site was initally a full online ordering site, however this was developed in erol and was slow and poor for search engine development, so we stripped it down to basic pages and have better search positions than ever plus no drop off in sales in fact the reverse. Our products are quite complicated to order online and generally the site develops the enquiry in one form or another and then the user would email or call us for further information. I know other sites can track who came in on what page, what product etc and whether it was from an affiliate which we have looked into but don't know how that could work for us because the user doesn't buy on line.

[sem4u]

Okay - well if you are spending that amount per month, you really need to use some sort of PPC tracking system (try a search for ROI tracking), to measure which keywords generate enquiries on your site. Then you can ditch or reduce the bids on the poor performing keywords.