The Pros and Cons of Pay-per-Click (PPC): The Cons

The Pros and Cons of Pay-per-Click (PPC): The Cons

Pay-per-Click (more commonly known as PPC) is one of the most remarkable advertising programs ever created. No other advertising vehicle allows advertisers to pay for the ad only when someone responds — clicks — on the ad.

PPC usually appears in search engine results as those short (2-3 line) text ads that generally appear at the top of the search results and on the right side of the page. Advertisers place “bids” on the keywords they believe their target market will use when the market searches for the kinds of services or products the advertiser offers. The higher your bid, the higher your ad will appear on the search engine results. And you only pay when someone clicks on the ad.

Sounds great, right? Well, it can be, if you have a large budget and have someone to help you prepare and execute your PPC campaign.

Below are some things we believe are the “cons” of PPC (we’ll write about the “pros” in our next post):

1) When someone clicks on your ad, you pay for it (your bid price) even if that person never buys anything from you. You could end up paying hundreds of dollars and see very little in the way of sales or new customers.

2) When you set up your PPC campaign, you’ll decide on a ceiling as to how much you’re willing to pay each day. If your ad ends up getting clicked on several times early in a day, and you reach your bid/budget limit for that day by, for example, 10 a.m., your ad won’t appear for the rest of the day. You’ll miss out on potentially tons of interested prospects.

3) Your maximum cost-per-click depends on how many other advertisers are vying for the keywords you choose. If you have a keyword that everyone uses, you’ll end up paying a lot of money “per click”: some keywords can go for $10 or more a pop.

4) If you don’t have a few hundred dollars to use — and a budget in the thousands is best — you may want to skip over PPC. Some experts believe you need to be able to spend $200-$500 just to get some action. You’ll need to tweak and re-tweak the  keywords you bid on again and again to come up with the best results for your goals.

If you need help with a PPC campaign, contact GoiMarketing.com. We can help you pick out the best keywords for your budget and help you earn a terrific ROI with your PPC campaign.

The maximum cost-per-click could vary depending on how many competitors for the keywords. If your keyword is highly targeted, with no one discover it yet, it means cheap clicks. Otherwise, the price could go over $2 per click.

You need a decent amount of budget to start, thousands of dollars if possible. Most PPC advertisers will lose at least two hundred dollars before could make steady conversion. Such trial and error is normal for both PPC and SEO campaigns.

Should you use PPC traffic, or perhaps you might want to focus on search engine optimization (SEO). These are the pros and cons of PPC advertising:

The advantages:

You don’t need to worry about search volume. When brainstorming for keywords, the longer, the better it would be. It doesn’t matter whether there’s people search for particular terms of not since you don’t need to put much effort to get ranked. If nobody search for the keywords, you pay nothing for it.

You can setup, get traffic and track for conversion very quick. No need to wait months or weeks to see result. If the result is positive, you can optimize the website and keywords for more conversion. If the result is bad, you might need to delete the keywords all together.

No hassle to complicated algorithm like inbound links or page rank. Unlike search engine optimization, PPC advertising is really simple to understand. All you need to understand is how to improve an algorithm known as quality score. Unlikes SEO process where domain age, inbound links, HTML tags and more are taken into calculation.

It is sustainable since you don’t need mercy from search engines. As long a you pay, your website will receive the traffic for sure.

Cheap traffic and almost free if you could achieve high click-through rate and quality score.

The cons:

Invalid clicks or click fraud could drain out your money overnight. Of course Google tries to overcome this problem, but it doesn’t mean click fraud doesn’t happen, especially when you turn on the content network.

The maximum cost-per-click could vary depending on how many competitors for the keywords. If your keyword is highly targeted, with no one discover it yet, it means cheap clicks. Otherwise, the price could go over $2 per click.

You need a decent amount of budget to start, thousands of dollars if possible. Most PPC advertisers will lose at least two hundred dollars before could make steady conversion. Such trial and error is normal for both PPC and SEO campaigns.

 

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