Has ANYONE been using ppc successfully anymore?

Hello Robert,

I've quite a few PPC campaigns and I run a few for some offline clients too. I've never had any trouble with them at all and I've even had a free advisory chat with a Google employee who gave me some very good tips.

If you want some really good information on it, I'd recommend going to Perry Marshalls blog where he has a free 5 day PPC course. It's very good indeed, he doesn't try and pitch anything and the guy is very well known for being particularly successful at PPC.

The sites I send traffic to are very diverse indeed, one thing they are though is very relevant to the advert and the keywords I'm targeting in my campaigns.

One other thing, don't make this one of those threads where you post your progress, I know the forum doesn't like them, obviously for the reason that if everyone did it, any new posts would stay on the front page for a few seconds and all the ongoing threads would permanently be there.

Not having a go at you Robert, just letting you know. Have a look at Perry Marshall too.

Edit....and if Andy's been doing this since it began, he'd be very much worth listening to as well. (No payment needed Andy)

Adwords is PPC :rolleyes:

Not everyone gets shut down.

Well, PPC is the fastest way to get noticed by the search engines or wherever you decide to advertise. It's just paying to have your sites ad posted very high in the rankings. Those ads on the right side of Google are paid ads. And, you pay for every click, but , it doesn't guarantee you will get sales so it's very risky and can cost a lot. So, be careful with it.

It's not solid as in predictable and stable, but there is always money in it and its fast vs other methods, thats why most people like it.

But for example, many bigger VC's, private equity, etc companies won't even touch a company that the majority of the traffic is paid traffic.

Hey David,

The beauty of PPC is that it's more like a science than many things online. You can work see exactly what you're spending, exactly what you're getting for the spend and can see quickly what any changes do to your results.

At the heart of PPC is - conversion rates and value per spend.

If you know what your visitor value is then it makes everything much simpler.

For example - if you have a sales page that converts at 0.5% (i.e you send 200 people to it and 1 person buys/signs up etc.) and you know that each new customer is worth $100 to you (that may be just on the front end sale, but ideally you want to have a decent funnel of products so that the average customer buys several products over their lifetime with you) then you know that you can afford to pay 50c per click for your ads in order to break even.

If you can increase your conversion rate then it means more profit.

If you can decrease your spend per click it means more profit.

But fundamentally you want to first work out what a new customer is worth if you want to know how much you can spend and make money.

Many people seem to overlook this simple fact and (for example) just send people to an affiliate product or page where they only get a commission on the front end sale - which puts them at a massive disadvantage because it means you only have that one-time revenue to cover your spending costs.

i.e your page converts at 0.5% but you make a commission of $20 one time. That means that your cost per click budget is 10c which may or may not be enough to get the traffic levels you need.

So - having a funnel which means your customers buy more than once means that your customer value is higher and you can spend more on clicks - this is the one biggest factor in outperforming your competition. They often just focus on the front-end sale and end up with a lower budget and can't work out how you make money by spending more than them.

Also making sure your ads go to the best possible page for what the ad was about makes a big difference. A lot of people just send their traffic to their homepage and get lower conversions. When your conversions are high you also get a better CPC which means you make more money and have more to spend.

Andy

I'm not fighting Robert, I've made my point

I just thought it was funny the guy, who knows nothing about me, knows for a fact my account will be closed.

He doesn't.

Besides, why would Google close all their customers accounts, except the big boys they already have, while all their competition keeps theirs?

Not really a very good business model is it. They want more customers, that's what most businesses tend to strive for.

I'm not going to carry on with this anymore but let me correct you.

I said not everyone will get shut down, you responded

You then said this, which is where I came out with the doomsday nonsense..

See, you didn't just mention craps.

Anyway, it doesn't matter.

It works for me but not for you, no idea why Google would turn away 10k a day or $3,650,000 a year though.

Nice to meet you all the same, we agree to disagree on this one.

lets get back on track.