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Are you paying too much for pay
per click advertising?
The cost for pay per click advertising is on the rise. According
to Jupiter Research, the average click price will jump from
US$0.29 in 2003 to US$0.26 in 2004 and US$0.47 in 2009. And
that's only the price for an average keyword.
The price for the top spot on Overture.com for "data
recovery" is currently US$4.30 per click. Google displays
an average cost pay click of US$9,10 for that keyword. That's
quite a lot for a single click. But do you get what you're
paying for?
US$10 million for consumers that do not exist
Click fraud is the practice of skewing pay-per-click advertising
data by generating illegitimate hits. Some statistics claim
that as much as 50 percent of pay per click advertising in
some competitive categories could be the product of bogus
clickers.
"John Squire, vice president for product marketing
for Coremetrics, which provides consulting and Web analysis
for online merchants like Eddie Bauer, OfficeMax and CompUSA,
estimated that the company's clients were spending about
US$10 million a year on fraudulent clicks. That is, they
are spending about US$10 million on consumers that do not
exist."
Click fraud is done by traffic affiliate partners of PPC
search engines who make a commission on paid clicks generated
by their web site visitors and by competitors who want to
decrease the effectiveness of your pay per click campaign.
Some of them hire human clickers or use automated programs
that click the paid listings for them. More information about
click fraud and the different methods can be found in these
articles:
What does this mean to you?
Pay per click advertising can be a good way to quickly get
visitors to your web site. However, pay per click advertising
should only supplement your normal search engine optimization
activities.
It should not be your main way of getting search engine traffic.
Track the return on investment for your pay per click campaigns
to make sure that pay per click advertising really works for
you.
A Consumer WebWatch study showed that web surfers prefer
non-paid search engine listings. For this reason, it's
better to get
high rankings in the normal search engine results. High
rankings in search engines will bring your web site targeted
visitors without paying for every single click.
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