Who does PPC?

[rogercbryan]

I need to put together a new PPC Campaign for my company and I'm not all that confident in my skills. Who uses PPC, how much to you spend, how do you track it all?

[MoneyMagnet]

How much you spend is really going to depend on your keywords. If you're going after keywords in high demand, you can pay upwards of 5 bucks. I use Adwords. I was paying $1.00-$1.50 for keywords on outdoor gear like camelbak. For my blog, I pay $0.20 per click on keywords related to my blog. Tracking stats is easy.

It definitely is a skill to maximize Adwords ROI.

[rogercbryan]

Key words in the vehicle donation industry run $12 to $22 per click based on the market. This is what make me nervous. I can burn through $5K in a week with out blinking.

[MoneyMagnet]

That's insane?! I thought 5 bucks for some of my keywords was retarded. I suggest either finding key-phrases that don't cost that much, or practice PPC on a website you have where keywords cost pennies. I had a sales conversion of less than 1.5% with adwords. I went through $86 before a sale triggered...I do consider it as a marketing expense tho, since it gave my site exposure to people.

[jasaunders]

Just as a comparison, I spend on average $.40 to $.80 per click for the scrapbooking website. We have about a 1% sales conversion, meaning we spend $40-$80 for every sale. Our average order is only $35, meaning we lose money with PPC. Our goal however is to build these orders into loyal, repeat customers. Many of our customers order again once they find we offer excellent service and products. But technically we need each PPC customer to order from us about three times before we break even. We also hope that many of our loyal PPC customers tell friends about us, lowering the break even.

As a comparison to other search engines, we pay the most for google. We pay the least for MSN and find PPC through MSN Adcenter has the best success in terms of conversions, length of browsing and number of pages visitors browse. We still use google and yahoo though to drive more traffic, because MSN can't deliver all that we need.

[topsearchresult]

Start a Google Adwords account and just mess around with it. If you have a budget of $5 for the month, that is all you will spend. PPC has a very low cost per lead compared to traditional mediums such as print and tv etc.

That being said there's no point paying for people to go to your site if you can't sell them something they want when they get there. What are you trying to sell?

[rogercbryan]

I've done decent sized campaigns for companies before. I'm not totally new to this. My last account was spending $5000 a month for six months advertising a new online auto auction. I ran the entire account. The problem was that at the end of six months my client was very unhappy with the results. The thing with that account was that actual sales were near impossible to track. People would have to register and although we asked them how they heard about us and could track that it was very hard to see what registrations turned into sales.

I'm most concerned about proper tracking. I'm great with numbers and can figure out a way to manipulate a single step transaction. Meaning click to donation ratio. Again I'm spending valuable advertising dollars on this. For the past year I have spent most of my money on print and radio but with the fn election coming up my rates are going through the roof. So now is the time for me to make the move into PPC. I've been doing SEO for six or so months so I think this should work well together.

[jasaunders]

With google analytics you can track conversions for just about anything, including new user registrations, sales, and anything else. As long as you have the code inserted and setup the conversion/goals tracking in Analytics, you can track whatever you want.

[SerialEntrepreneurs.]

We manage $10M annual PPC spend for our clients and have a pretty wild proprietary ppc management tool that manages bids and conversions like a stock portfolio..