Many people look to PPC Advertising ( pay per click) campaigns to promote their productsStop Light online. The idea is to be able to buy traffic and send it to your website. If the product converts well and you pay less for the traffic than the revenue generated from sales of that product then you make a profit.

Why are we buying traffic?

This is because when you first start out, you don’t have organic traffic (people finding your website by typing in keywords into a search box) to rely on. PPC Advertising is a short term solution to generating traffic but not necessarily a profitable one.

Many people promote this form of traffic generation and it is made out to be a very simple process of setting it up and bang watch the money come in.

Not so Easy!

The reality of when you set out on a PPC Adverting campaign, is that in the first few months it’s going to cost you a lot of money, because what you are actually doing is buying information. Until that information filters through, you don’t know which keywords are going to get you the sales. Some of the keywords will cause people to browse and not actually buy. Yes you can be selective on your keywords by using only relevant keywords but it is still a trial and error process.

Once you have collected the data then you can keep the keywords that get a result and take out the bad. So even when you have narrowed it down to a few keywords you might find that there is not a lot of traffic searches on those keywords. Overall you may get it into a profitable situation, but how many sales is that going to get you over a year if the traffic volumes are small.

Let us Look at the Figures

It’s easier to see by looking at the figures. I recently had a go at PPC Advertising. I set up a Yahoo campaign to promote a product. During a 4 week campaign I spent $325 and had 1632 clicks on my Yahoo Search Marketing ads. Of the 1632 visitors to my website through paid traffic 316 people visited the product which a pretty good conversion of 19%. Of the 316 visitors there were 3 sales generating revenue of $129, roughly a 1% conversion which I believe is an industry standard.

So overall buying the information has cost roughly $200 dollars. So at this stage let us tidy up the campaign by using only the keywords that converted. That was 3 by the way. The cost of the converting keywords was $45, so if we managed to generate the same result over the next month then $129 would have cost $45 and a profit of $84 per month would be made. That’s hardly the tens of thousands of dollars being promised by many vendors selling their products.

Yes we could get more keywords but as you can see, to test it over a longer period is going to cost more. Maybe you can get five or six campaigns going in different search engines to get the overall volumes.

But as you can see it is not an easy task and not for the beginner. Can you imagine trying to run five or six campaigns? Just one can be a handful. Other problems faced on a daily basis are the fluctuation in prices that you have to bid, to get your ad shown and editorial issues where the search engines provider suddenly decides you are not allowed to use that word in advertising anymore.

As you can appreciate it is not a scenario of setting it up and letting it rip! It’s more likely to rip a hole in your wallet and leave you disillusioned. It goes back to the same old story you can’t easily jump the queue.

Why not spend the money and the time doing Research Before Starting and aim for a Page One Rank instead. Let me know about your PPC Advertising experiences in the comments section.

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Richard Hurford

Aspiring Internet Affiliate Marketer