The Problem With Pay-Per-Click

Author: John Manley

Article source: http://www.selfseo.com/. Used with author's permission.

Let's assume your website has a good conversion rate. Somewhere between 1% and 2% of all visitors become customers. You can continue to split test your site and aim for a higher conversion. But for the moment, it may be wiser to put your resources into bringing down the cost of traffic.

How much does it cost to get traffic to your site? If you are like most sites, you rely primarily on pay-per-click advertisements. Those little ads that appear on search engines when users type in keywords that relate to your website's content.

$2,500 To Attract One Client?

As you may know, keywords are bid upon by you and your competitors. There was a day when 25 cents was considered a high bid. Now I'm seeing some keywords, such as "lawyer" or "accidental death" rising as high as $25. If that lawyer's site is only converting one in 100 (which is good), he has to pay $2,500 just to gain one client. I'd hate to see that client's bill.

Even with a moderately priced keyword at $1.50, you're putting out $300 to gain one customer. (is this now assuming a 0.5% conversion rate instead of 1% as was mentioned earlier?) For high-priced items with a lot of backend, this is still profitable… Yet most of us would prefer a cheaper way to advertise.

I have found several methods that are more cost effective. Also, they often generate better, more ready-to-buy customers.

You see, other than just the high cost of pay-per-click traffic, there are other problems…