The advertising industry in general is ushering in a new era of communication. PPC is simply a branch in a technology-driven transformative industry. The comments made about PPC would also apply to print ads. But the good news is that technology provides the tools to refine and solve issues like relevance, trust and cost. Advertising, technology and the consumer will progress together.

And Google should quit being so arbitrary in their concern about “offensive material” being displayed next to their adverts. They have no such compunction when the searches are on their search engine. They display adverts for some pretty disgusting stuff there.

But they are quite strict with some blogs and web sites.

I have a moderately popular blog–that is primarily political (libertarian oriented–which fits in with Google’s philosophy)), but sometimes naughty in a PG Wonkette or Playboy kind of way. I continually had trouble with them blanking out ads on particular post and putting up Public Service Announcements. Sometimes I would write a short piece talking about their nanny ways.

And then last weekend for no particular reason they suddenly cut off all adverts. I have asked for an explanation, but so far have received nothing.

I am really baffled why they decided to cut off the adverts at that time–the post was a music review of all things. But I do not know if I will ever find out.

I replaced the ads with Bidvertiser–but that is not as lucrative as Google by any stretch. However, I would rather do that than kow tow to the arrogant Mountain View folks–especially since I really did not do anything wrong or offensive.

I am sure I am not the only person who has had the experience. But though I am popular, I am not big enough to really matter to them.

~Becky

I think that if Pay-Per-Click is going to be over, so will also be the Cost-Per-Action. The answer is simple: In order for people to get to the intended website and register, they first need to click on an ad of some sort. If they don’t click, they will not reach the site, and thus will not register or buy the product.

Maybe there should be more CPM (Cost-Per-Mil) programs. It causes companies a fixed cost, and at least publishers are getting something for displaying the ads (thus reducing fraud rate – you either get visits, or don’t). Of course, engines would have to filter out publisher websites who would sign up for CPM with the sole purpose of spam, but this is also true for every other ad type.

I don’t think the pay per click party is over at all. I do, however, think that google is fixing to introduce something new and get out of the click biz as they have been.

If you’re a publisher, lately your clicks seem to magically disappear from the report daily. Check one day and you have 150, later that day it is 130. Why? Nobody knows. I think they are skimming from publishers and that is why their profits went up.

This would be shooting themselves in the foot. If publishers no longer want them they have no place to put the ads. Why would they do this? Google is not known for mistakes and being stupid. They’d do it because they have something new up their sleeve ready to launch and are going to dump the click stuff as it is now.

Just a theory of mine… Time will tell.

As a small one man band internet based marketer I rely on PPC for my livelyhood. Click costs in the UK Insurance market are huge thanks to all the big boys.

My savior was Overture until Panama came along. Prior to panama standard match was placed above advanced match in the ppc results meaning that pople bidding on niche phrases like “car insurance northern ireland” (around 20p) came above those who bid advanced match “car insurance” at several £’s per click.
This meant that the PPC results were very relevant to the query.

In Panama on subtle but not so well publicised change occured that instantly fattened the wallets of Yahoo. Standard match no longer got precedence over advanced match so overnight niches phrases were obliterated with PPC ads from top dollar bidders who where prepared to pay for “car insurance +anything”.

Relevancey in ppc adswent out the window as Yahoo raked in more clicks on higher paying ads.

This was a bitter pill for small nieche marketers like me as at the same time Yahoo bleated on about Panamas ranking alogorithm improving the quality and relevancy of PPC for the surfer.

In my given example very few UK car insurers can quote for N iRELAND, so its a nieche market which I served well. Now my PPC is on page 4 not page 1 and I would have to pay over 10 times the bid price I had the day before. The user is now presented with ppc results that dont serve the N Ireland market but pay better for Yahoo.

Sorry to rant, but the continual propaganda about paid search releveancy from Yahoo rings hollow when you see them ignore relevancy for profit, hit small business hard in the process.

OOh if only Miva traffic converted better !!!

Thaks for listening.

A well written article and it does illustrate the challenges that marketers are faced with in providing a strong ROI for web based traffic and PPC initiatives. PPC Fraud is a significant risk for everyone and not necessarily in Googles interest to fix as it takes away from their short term revenue while challenging their long term business model. Marketers will need to become better at monetizing the qualified eyes that do view their site.

For anyone that is looking to have a greater impact on visitors, I would recommend http://www.HookSell.com and their HookTour services.

They have filled the gap between visitors and leads rather nicely with a direct sales approach to buying behaviors.

Check out their 3 minute tour:

http://hooktours.com/start/6045/

Services of this type will continue to grow in an effort to further simplfy the education process for pay per click visitors that are qualified. Perhaps Google will eventually adopt a pay for performance model along the lines of a HookSell product for at least a higher quality PPC service with perhaps a premium added.

If anyone has any other suggestions about how to better convert my PPC visitors I look forward to hearing their suggestions.

Thank you for writing this piece about pay per click. I don’t use pay per click advertising on my website for exactly the reasons you described. I prefer to stick with affiliate marketing for now because at least it’s easier to control what ads are placed on my website, than Adsense. As you said, Google has had a lot of success with them. But I wonder what they will come up with next when Adsense starts to decline in popularity?

Nothing is as damning as numbers. I have been involved in Internet Marketing since 1996. I have been an advertiser on Google, Yahoo and MSN for well over two years. The stats say it all -

Two years ago click thru or conversion rates were running about 12% with the ads that I ran – organic results produced about 3%.

Today click thru or conversion rates for paid ads (anywhere) are running <1%. – organic results produces 4.5%.

The public has become blind to these ads.

we have been on the ppc market ourself and we can say that the business owners globally are not full aware of the potential quality ppc engines/networks can give them to their business.

for sure we will see many new ways on showing ppc ads in the near future

I spent quite some time and a lot of money last year with Google Ads and Yahoo Search, at a monetary cost of around $10,000 but a personal time cost of much more than that – I obviously got immediate results, but these lasted seconds as soon as I cut back on the program. This year I revamped my sites, invested my time heavily in good SEO improvements, converted to CSS (very time consuming) but the results have been outstanding and much more permanent. PPC is a great way to get noticed quickly, but my experience tells me that real results come from hard work and solid page redevelopment, with a good SEO understanding. I think PPC gives results that are an illusion which disappear very quickly as soon as you cut back. It’s a fantastic money earner for Google et al, but web site owners like me do not receive lasting benefits. I assume that in different markets, the results will vary.

Yes the party is over. It is still sucking up millions of dollars from the victims
of unscrupulous Google advertising prices politix.
It is close to impossible to make money thru PPC even after applying all the rules right.
And its not because of congestion on net. It is because of Google advertising prices politix.

I agree with the comment that smaller companies are leaving – but think click fraud is also a major reason – we were #1 on free search – relevant – then we added PPC and found our “free” listing went down almost 10 pages – so we increased our PPC – Did I say relevant by the way? – now click my key words (we no longer go near google) and you get everything but the right product… and to boot – we proved that click fraud buried guys like us … we used to spend $1000 per month with google – now we spend -0- and we are not the only small business I know who gave up.

Since the beginning we made a customer click for prices – we saw our “request” for pricing go from 98% down to less than 5% – if this is not click fraud – what is?… but our funds were “expended” to the max every day – early!!!!! So then we added prices – same conversion rate – down from 98% (phenomenal) to less than 5% … enough said????

Goodbye google – etc … we are back to phones – email campaigns and trade shows.. and we were among the first to go with PPC in our field.

Bob Lieberman, Managing Director
Glass Packaging Solutions LLC

I really don’t see PPC going away anytime soon. I would assume that changes will continue to be made, but the overall program will not leave. If PPC is done right, it can still be an effective means. I think plenty of people abuse AdSense, so it could be interesting to see what happens there.

Rich Ord is right! CPC costs for small businesses our going to drive them out of the market unless they are selling unique items with 1000′s of percent margains.

We are a small business selling products for the food service industry. Our CPC bids requirements have doubled and for some keywords have more tripled in the last two months. I don’t know what the search engines(i.e. “G”) are doing if anything, but we cannot double and triple our ad budgets every other month.

Google is introducing Cost Per Action. I thought it might offer us some benefit since we could set it up to pay only when we actually made a sale. Trouble with that is we sell some items for $1.00 and some for over $10,000. A fixed CPA bid would be fine if all our sales were for the same amount. What Google needs to offer is a CPA bid process based on a % of the sale amount. Anyone should be able to deal with that, although Google would surely be concerned about “sale amount fraud”.