Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising Still Profitable?

It was that easy!

To determine how much I could spend on my campaign and to calculate my maximum bid, I would use tracking software to discover the source of my sales and then simply divide the gross amount achieved by the number of visitors to my site.

This scientific marketing approach produced a real healthy return on my investment. So I continued to top-up my pay-per-click account and watch my profits grow!

Slowly, over time my results began to change...for the worse! More and more advertisers began to take advantage of the clear benefits of advertising online, being able to reach targeted niche markets quickly and easily. With the increase in competition for popular keywords came higher and higher bids, with each advertiser striving for the exclusive pole position. The end result was a bidding war!

As the bids increased, the popular keyword terms that previously brought in huge profits started to be come too expensive. The actual cost of achieving a reasonably high position to attract the customer's attention began to take over the amount that was achieved in sales. If I lowered the bid amount, as to make the campaign profitable, the amount of traffic that was delivered was simply not enough to make the campaign worthwhile.

So this was my position regarding pay-per-click advertising up to a few weeks ago. If you are an online advertiser who has used pay-per-click advertising over the last couple of years or so, then my experience will probably sound very familiar to you..

So when I released my latest ebook, as you can imagine, I was a little wary of committing all my advertising to one popular pay-per-click source. I needed to promote my product but at the same time I didn't need to simply throw money away for the sake of getting a listing in the search engine results.

So, I decided to perform a comparison test between 3 different pay-per-click traffic sources with an initial budget of $200 committed to each pay-per-click engine for my latest ebook 'Cash From Your Camera' http://www.cashfromyourcamera.com

The first was the most popular of the pay-per-click system of advertising - Google Adwords

The second was another fairly popular source of pay-per-click traffic - Kanoodle at http://www.kanoodle.com

Finally, I tested a new kind of traffic source - Have Traffic at http://www.havetraffic.com. This isn't actually a PPC search engine. It is a form of advertising known as "contextual advertising". My ads were shown on a network of sites instead of as the result of search on a search engine.

Here are my results....

First, for the Google traffic, my average cost per click was 45 cents for the range of different keywords I was bidding on. I received a total of 449 visitors and 1 order. I also received 20 sign-ups to my newsletter providing a sign-up conversion rate of around 4.4% and ROI of 43%

Kanoodle provided much more traffic for my dollars. I actually received 1523 visitors at around 8 cents a visitor. Unfortunately, the results were very disappointing. The campaign did not achieve a single sale and I got only 2 confirmed sign-ups to my newsletter....not good!

Have Traffic was the real surprise package.

I received 1,000 visitors for my $200 and actually received 3 sales and 46 subscribers to my newsletter. The return on my investment was a 135% plus I received 46 leads with which to follow-up

Just one of the campaigns broke even and that one only earned 135% ROI. I'm sure that if I optimize everything a little better then Google and Have traffic would provide a real profitable return on my investment. Unfortunately it does appear that Kanoodle is a bust no matter what I do. Its a shame. In the distant past I could count on decent traffic from them

If I had used different keywords then it may have been possible to achieve different results for the campaigns

But overall, this test shows that it is still possible to find cost effective pay-per-click advertising. You just have to look harder (sometimes at unexpected sources) and optimize your adcopy quite a bit more than was necessary in the past for even solid known good sources of traffic like Google.

One of a series of articles by Robert Hartness, successful freelance photographer and writer of Cash From Your Camera which offers a step-by-step guide to those on the threshold of freelance photography and is illustrated with 40+ published photographs.