Are you pouring money down the Pay Per Click drain?
David Rosam on Oct 09 2007 at 12:11 pm | Filed under: Pay Per Click
An alarming number of people and companies using Pay Per Click (PPC) are quite happy to just buy traffic. Maybe even up to £2000 a month just to get people to glance at the site. And that’s a lot of money for a small business. Why aren’t they taking it that step further and measuring the returns on their PPC investment?
I mentioned this to my old university chum Peter Purton last week, when we were talking about Internet advertising, and he seemed less perturbed than me. I guess, as a person with a background in dead-tree publishing, he feels more comfortable with his observation that people are used to not knowing whether their advertising works or not. And that mindset is simply carried over into the Internet (and hence into Google’s bottom line, I added), where they buy traffic blindly.
My advice is, at the very least, to set up conversion tracking in Adwords or YSM and keep an eye on the cost per conversion. Compare that to your profit on each sale. You may be in for a shock. In Pete’s former newsletter business he’d have been looking at the lifetime value of the customer, though, so you may want to compare the conversion cost with the repeat business you’d be expecting from them.
Even better, set up a Google Analytics account, and some Goals and really start to understand what’s happening with your PPC - and other online marketing - spend.
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