Pay per click ads effectiveness?

[David Sandusky]

Because I am not an expert in this topic, I do what I think is logical. Using the top search engines, searched for my business topics and do the same for some client's business topics. Think. What would your clients be looking for? I look at what comes up in the results as well as ads.
Are you a commodity or do you see a need? If you see a need, start writing because you may have an opportunity. If your topics are plentiful, what make you unique?

Update: I pulled ppc (for now) because organic is working. I can tell organic is the way, but watching ppc and other options closely.

I noticed that unless doing homework, I only look at results of a search and perhaps sponsors of a targeted site.

What do you see?

[tele]

when i look for something of interest or need online, i always find websites from search results and can honestly say I dont pay attention to ads. the ads you cant avoid are annoying and dont inspire me to click.
i suppose i would if timing was perfect. that is similar to ads on tv, radio, print. so there might be something to say about subconscious views and the remembering when a need arises.

[ChristianDeBlis]

I think that content in combination with partnerships on the web are what really builds a presence. PPC helps build a marketing presence... but I don't think it can be trusted to increase sales.

[searchguru]

Bringing in visitors to your site is not guaranteed to bring in sales. Your website needs to do all the selling.

PPC tends to eat the budget very quickly. But, you can also market yourself a number of other ways, such as posting articles, making sure that your Google and Yahoo Local profiles are accurate, blogging, and inbound links.

[Jenita]

Hi,

PPC works nowadays. Itz helpful for people who are doing their business from home.

[bryangiss]

After working for a PPC search engine for two years I would tell anyone setting aside budget for this to use it ONLY if you are wanting to draw traffic to your site and ONLY for that purpose. Click fraud is a mojor source of the traffic you will get from PPC as there are a number of programs and bots built to defraud PPC advertisers and sites. The statistics Google and the rest will give you is that about 33% of clicks is fraudulent. Which in and of itself is a fraudulent statement. It is more to the tune of %0 - 60% based on traffic reports I have seen. The biggest problem is third party traffic coming from behavioral companies and others that make up most of the click volume but cannot be monitored well by the PPC companies.
So use it to generate traffic but don't expect sales.

[David Sandusky]

Thanks for the perspectives from people with real experience in PPC and related advertising!

[psiphon]

Originally Posted by David Sandusky

How effective are pay per click ads today and what does the future look like? Which wins: fraudulent clicks or paying customers?

Basically PPC ads are effective when your visitor value is greater than your cost per click. It doesn't matter if there is click fraud or not. Your visitor value is dependent upon the effectiveness of the sales page they land on, your follow-up system, the price of the product you are selling, and your back-end sales.

All of these things need to be calculated and determined, which means strict attention to statistics is a must. If you have a good back-end system, then you can actually run your PPC campaigns at a loss because you will make up the costs by selling products and services to your visitors (prospects) down the road.

B. Hopkins

[David Sandusky]

I am interested to see the PPC and SEO thoughts coincide here. I started a new thread for SEO specific discussion starting with a link to a great article I just read from a fellow LinkedIn MLPFer

[ChristianDeBlis]

AdWords, over the past 2.5 months, has really increased traffic to my site, as well as sales. Every 2-4 weeks, I've raised my budget - seen more traffic - and sales have grown.

Organic is fantastic, but it takes time. PPC is today. I'm redesigning my site to increase the organic traffic, but right now my traffic is generated from AdWords.