Just Me, Or Is ALL PPC Networks Getting Too EXPENSIVE??

There are some networks that will allow you to bid even below 0.10 per click. There is no way that you should pay $0.50 per click. I think that you are doing it wrong.

If you go on Yahoo, you can set your bids at $0.15 too. Sure your ads will not get a lot of impressions but if you work to find the many keywords that are related to your niche, then you can get a good amount of clicks per day.

Other then PPC, you have a lot of other options to promote your website.

You have articles, video marketing, forum marketing, find high traffic websites in your niche and see if they allow text ads, banner ads, solo ads, the list goes on and on.

Thanks for your feedback...

Many networks have high bid minimums. And bidding low gets your competition on top, prime ctr spaces. Studies I've read prove that these placements are critical for ctr's and conversions?

PPC is a tricky beast. But can be profitable depending on your offer and your expectations for your visitor.

The lower down the food chain you go on networks, the harder immediate conversions will be to get.

If your item is $50 then a 50 cent click will break even at a 1% conversion rate. And that's not taking into consideration other COGS.

So you have a couple options...

1) Keep lowering your standards trying to find a cheaper network among the bottom feeders hoping for better results. Heck even PPV is up to a nickel in some cases now.

2) Change your expectations increasing your conversion rate.

Top tier PPC isn't expensive just for poops and giggles. It's because it works. There are some paying over $50 per click! BUT HOW?!

Because they optimize and optimize and optimize their keywords targeting very specific traffic and firing words that don't work. They optimize and optimize and optimize their ads so that on those higher cost words, their target clicks but their tire kicking free-loaders don't.

On your landing page, what are your expectations? An immediate sale or nothing? Then expect 1% and hope for the best. OR... How else can you capitalize on the OTHER 99%?

1) Add some time sensitive motivators. I despise BS scarcity tactics but along those same lines.

2) The hook. If they aren't "NOW" buyers then give them something. Adding them to a very specific list that can nurture them into a later buyer.

3) Constantly be optimizing! When you think you're done split testing....you're not. Keep split testing and optimizing. Fire duds quick - dud keywords, and dud traffic sources, and dud offers, and dud hooks. Fire them!

When you can change your expectations by listing up many of the 99% of later buyers instead of sending them packing, then optimize your ads, and words and offers, testing everything, you will leave your competitors behind scratching their heads and posting on forums complaining about the high cost of clicks.

Let them use the wide open firehouse method wiping out their bank account in 24 hours cause they couldn't catch any "now" buyers.

If anything, I think they're getting more strict.

Yes, It is quite right!

Check out the recent New York Times report "Small Players Seek an Alternative to the Expense of Pay-Per-Click" by Darren Dahl.

Due to the increase in the prices of PPC, many small business owners wondering how they would manage this price increment.

As more and more people are using internet search so more exposure to ads because ads are good way for getting traffic.

One other reason of rising PPC advertising prices is inflation. There is a huge rise in inflation rate over the last decade so more than 40% of prices rise for no other reason.
Other reason could be the falling revenue of Google's cost per click. See the interesting data on PPC here:



So what to do now?

Get smart about your online marketing campaign. Use free and extremely useful other SEO strategies like:

Social media marketing - Facebook, twitter, Google+, Pinterest ( I must say Pinterest give you much better results than PPC advertising, it's my personal experience) It's a great unpaid way to bring traffic to your website.

Do guest blogging, video marketing, Web 2.0 submissions.

There are plenty of fun ways to increase percentage of traffic to a website.

There's plenty of same niche sites/blogs/forums that get decent traffic, you have more than enough alternatives to high cost PPC. Look around your niche & find sites willing to sell banner space.

If you are worried about the cost of PPC getting up to 50 cent minimum clicks now, then you are looking at it the wrong way.

The campaigns I manage for my clients and employer average $10-$16 per click and above, and they are still profitable.

However, not because they sell mega-expensive products or services, but rather, because there is a right way to manage PPC campaigns and most users aren't using it.

At the end of the day, it comes down to some key factors:

1) Conversion rate - if your conversion rate is high enough, you can afford to pay big bucks. If it's too low, you can't. Every single cent you spend on AdWords should be tracked down to conversion, so you know which keyword, ad, landing page or even offer produces the highest ROI/conversion rate.

I can always tell when a campaign is under performing (in 5 secs) because when I log into their account, they do not have conversion tracking active.

2) Profit per sale - if you don't actually make enough real profit for each sale, you cannot afford to pay the big bucks. If you only make $5, $10 or even $50 per sale, then it's pretty obvious that you would need a *very high* conversion rate to overcome that low margin, especially if the click charges are multiple dollars or even tens of dollars.

Too many adwords advertisers try to use it to promote low profit products or services, which is just a plain waste of time & money. I tend to encourage clients to run with a minimum of $100-$200 PROFIT per SALE, and even higher than that if your conversion rate is low.

3) Test, test, test and keep testing, to find which keywords, ads, landing pages and even bid prices are profitable, and ditch the rest. This is possibly the hardest thing for newbies to figure out, but you HAVE to get it right or you'll burn your money fast.

4) Negative keywords - your negative keyword list should be massive. Block your ads from showing from ANY keyword that is not highly relevant, or you will waste your money fast. I usually have 100 negs MINIMUM in even the smallest campaign, and some of them have 1000s or even 10s of 1000s. Google "negative keywords list" to find some good places to start from. Make sure you consider including geo terms as negs, to ensure your ads don't show up for geographic targeted searches that are not relevant to your business locale.

Have a shot with this free tool as well, just to get started The Free Negative Keywords Tool - WordStream's Free Negative Keyword Tool

5) Unless you are an adwords pro, do NOT use broad match keywords. Stick to Phrase & Exact match only. Broad match has the potential to waste a lot of your money, unless you know what you are doing.

6) Match keyword to ad to landing page. Don't drop all clicks on the home page (for example). Build highly targeted landing pages for each important keyword and write an ad that contains that keyword in the ad title and also has it in the landing page title.

I see lots of adwords advertisers not doing this (even the ones using "supposed" google professionals) and it costs them big bucks.

For example, if you are advertising for car insurance, you should consider building a landing page, ad group, ad and keyword set for each model &/or make of car.

e.g. "ford mustang insurance" shows an ad with the keyword in the title and lands on a page just for ford mustang insurance. Ditto for "ford taurus insurance" & "ford focus insurance" etc.

This is one of my favourite "tricks" to generate 5%, 10% even 20% CTR and high conversion rates for campaigns targeting expensive keywords.

An additional trick to make this work even better is to add negative keywords at the adgroup level to control which ads show and which ones don't. So, the mustang ad group has taurus, focus and so forth in it as negs.

7) If possible, start small so far as your keyword list goes. Test and tweak a small number of keywords to get started, not 1000s at a time.

The 80/20 rule applies to AdWords big time, and it's often a small number of keywords that drive most of the sales/leads.

The long tail is a very popular concept, but it isn't so successful in AdWords these days. In many cases, it's the short tail keywords that get the results.

Also, if you're not already an AdWords pro, you will struggle to make a long tail campaign perform because it will have too many things going on at once for you to keep an eye on.

To give you an idea of how powerful all of the above components are when put together, I am currently managing a campaign of $10k/month, with an avg cpc of $10.93, that is getting more conversions & cheaper conversions per month than their previous agency produced with an avg CPC of $4.85.

In other words, while my avg CPC is 225% higher than theirs, I still get more leads & cheaper than they did!

Another example, from a client 3-4 years ago, I was able to optimise their campaign from $132 per lead down to $8 per lead, while also increasing the number & quality of leads the campaign produced.

The CPC is not always a good judge of success when it comes to AdWords, because if the campaign is run properly, it can be made to fly, even with a really high CPC.

Contrary to what Google (and the other CPC networks) would have you believe, PPC is NOT easy or simple. Without education & hands-on experience, you will usually crash and burn.

If you want to be good at PPC, you NEED to learn it and practise it.

Plenty of good books on the subject will help you figure out the basics. Otherwise, get a professional to do it for you, or go try a different type of advertising with less restrictions (ppv, cpv, social media, etc.)

From my experience, a few tricks have helped me enable get lower prices for the clicks:

1) Ignore the suggestive bid price! Those are for meant for big shop retailers doing top advertising dollars to waltz their money. As a thumb rule I always go for half the suggested bid price - and I still get decent enough traffic, and run profitable campaigns - without burning my money in a day. The trick being you will have to wait it out, don't be tempted to bid higher when you don't see your creatives getting not many exposure, may be even nil initially for a day or two - inevitably your will start being shown and you will get decent traffic - at half the cost or less. I do a lot of PPC on mutiple networks - and I have never bid more than .25 for anything - be it any country, any market. I might at times bid a little higher just to start it off, get a feel of the creatives that do well and optimize, but I always bring it down to lower, and still do well.

2) Micro targeting! I run multiple campaigns micro targeting various possible sub-dems within a specific dem category - be it by cities, by specific age or more. This has worked unbelievably well, and when combined with the previous tactic yields me pretty profitable low cost bids.

3) Once you have an established well optimized campaign with high CTRs - convert it to CPM - and micro manage the advt running times within a day in this mode. This again has given me more cost savings, and more clicks for fewer prices.


Ofcourse, its always down to testing, testing and testing!

Good luck!

You just need to work out how much (on average) each visitor is worth and make sure the price you pay for traffic doesn't exceed that amount per visitor.

For example, if I found out that around every 10 visitors convert and buy my product which is priced at $40, the price I would pay (at a maximum) would be $4 making no profit. You get the idea.

Think of your website as a machine. Input traffic costs, output gross profit. Seeing as you've mentioned your conversions = 0, that is probably what you need to work on first before driving traffic, otherwise you're just throwing money into the deep blue ocean.

The trouble with the networks that offer 'low-cost' traffic is the quality of the visitors is almost always low.

The trouble with the decent networks is the cost is high. There's no way around these facts. That means you REALLY have to optimize everything or you're going to lose your shirt.

Very good detailed information.

One thing though, I am able to run $50 retail items on ads or some PLAs with a $10 gross profit (before advertising) using PPC at $1.06/click average with an 18% conversion rate. Yielding an average $4 net profit/item

Once I get the campaigns purified and optimized like this, I open the flood gates on my daily budget and say send me all the traffic you've got on this campaign.

It may not seem worth it for a $4 profit. However, the competition can't easily adjust this way or even figure it out. But these little machines spitting out $4-$5 all day long really add up quite nicely.

So don't dismiss small ticket items or even retail completely...AS LONG AS the campaigns are constantly tracked, purified of trash and optimized.

AND...ainNO Panda or Penguin gonna poop on my party either. I know what is happening at all times, and I can turn it on or off at will. Not having to wait 60 days doing rank checking on a bank of keywords that may or may not even convert IF even the big G bestows their Algorithmic blessings upon me.