Are Pay-For-Clicks Worth The Cost?

[glauber]

Thinking of my own search patterns, i never use goto.com or the newer pay-for-clicks sites. Are they worth the bother? Do they deliver substantially more traffic than the usual combination of Yahoo+Looksmart+ODP+Inktomi?

g

[Mike_Mackin]

>Do they deliver substantially more traffic than the usual combination of Yahoo+Looksmart+ODP+Inktomi?

That will depend on how you rank in the above vs what you bid on GoTo. You have the option of turning the traffic on or off at GoTo.

>Is it worth it?
That will depend on your ROI.

See also [webmasterworld.com...]

[glauber]

Has it been worth the bother in your experience?

[Mike_Mackin]

Yes, but that does not mean that it will work for you.

In addition to bidding for position you must write a compelling title and description. Then your site must convert and your profit margin must be such that you get an acceptable ROI.

This can be very subjective stuff.
One company may accept a 10% ROI where others will want to double their money.

.......anyone else?

[Nathan Power]

Glauber,

Thinking of my own search patterns, I never use ODP, LookSmart, HotBot or Excite.

I still submit the pages of my site to these search engines and work on SEO from time to time in order to get good rankings in them.

You have to trial advertising your site on pay per click search engines with low bids on various keywords and find a basic conversion rate to work off.

Once you have your conversion rate, say 5%, you can then find out how much you can spend.

If your site sells a product worth $20 and you make $10 per sale, with a conversion rate of 5%, you won't want to spend more on getting 20 prospective buyers to your site than you make by selling the product.

Bidding an average of 5 cents on keywords will cost you $1 per sale. Obviously that is still a good margin.

Bidding an average of 50 cents on keywords will cost you $10 per sale. Obviously, 0, is not a good margin.

I hope that helps.

[glauber]

Thanks!

In our case i'm thinking if we can use .05 bids, we would probably spend $5 to make $15; may still be acceptable. It will depend on what other bids we're competing against in the category we choose, so i guess i have my research to do.

Is it worth being in one of the pay per clicks if your bid is not the highest? I'd think if you're not in the first 3 sites listed then you won't get many clicks.

g

[Nathan Power]

Glauber,

Unlike most people believe, being ranked lower doesn't bring you less quality traffic, it just brings you less traffic.

If the particular search engine you are advertising in has enough traffic, you will get visitors when your site is ranked 20th and beyond.

If you're ranked 3rd, 4th or 5th, depending on how targeted the keywords are, you obviously won't receive as much traffic as being ranked higher but, the visitors you receive will generally be more targeted.

It really depends on your site, the keywords, your site title and description and your ranking, though.

[webace]

Hmmm, let's see a 40 cent bid works out to $40,000 per 100,000 hits. I don't think PPC's are worth the cost. There are a number of reasons I feel this way.

You pay for useless hits and hits from people using them as some sort of mailing list.

Once a dollar is spent there is no further promotion benefit from it.

In highly competitive areas you have live on the site in order to keep your ranking where you want it.

You have to pay for every search term.

The same money can be used in a much more cost effective way to promote multiple search terms instead of just one.

Since my sites average 60+ #1 rankings and 120+ top ten rankings on the major search engines I get more hits to my site than goto gets for the same search.

There is something to be said for putting extra effort into your promotions.