I think the cost of Pay-Per-Click is the biggest roadblock most clients have with getting started on a successful online marketing campaign.

Unfortunately, that’s like saying, “it’s too expensive to spend $1,000 a month while it makes me $3,000 a month.” Pay-per-click campaigns can (and should) be started off with very small dollar amounts in very localized regions, allowing you to accumulate statistics before increasing your dollar investments. But running a pay-per-click campaign without running any website analytics is like shooting a fly with a shotgun (and paying for every pellet) whereas a smartly run and optimized pay-per-click campaign would be like shooting the fly with a rifle (and only paying for a single pellet).
If you’ve placed pay-per-click ads before and stopped because you thought they were too expensive, ask yourself these questions:

• Do I see other competitors in my industry continually advertising in the top 2 – 3 blue banner ads above all results on Google (and yes, those blue highlighted ads up top are paid ads) or in any of the positions on the right hand side of a search results page? Do you think they’re doing it because they’re making money? And if so, what do they have that makes it profitable for them that you’re not seeing?

• Did you have website analytics software monitoring and adjusting your pay-per-click ads as they were running? Because this makes a huge difference in how much money you spend (or save) on search engine advertising. It will also make a difference in how your ads are ranked.

• On Google, pay-per-click ad ranking is NOT just about how much you’re willing to pay per click. And Yahoo has recently announced that they plan to move to the same ranking model as Google.

• Did you run analytics to determine where to best advertise, where not to advertise, which keywords to invest in, and which keywords to dump?

• Did you have a database that tied into your website to automatically store your leads and potential customers in a database to be reached out to later or at peak seasons of the year? Or did you let all those clicks you paid for go to waste?

• Did you monitor for click-fraud? The search engines have become much better at recognizing it and giving refunds for it. But did you record web logs?

• If you sell to the public or sell a service with a long buying cycle, did you reach into that database to create email newsletters, which have proven to increase small business website sales as much as 5% a month?

Think about it – if your competitors do this and you don’t they could be making 60% more each year off of every ad dollar they spend than you.

• Did you create Landing Pages for your pay-per-click ads? Most websites are not designed for search engines. Landing Pages are pages on your site specifically created for that particular pay-per-click ad.

If you answered “no” to most of these questions above, do you think that those competitors of yours did? And do you think that Pay-Per-Click was too expensive or it wasn’t executed correctly?

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