It is widely known that PPC is one of, if not the, most effective way to advertise online with the likes of and banner advertising trailing well behind. This does not mean pay per click advertising is going to work for every type of person out there. It is flexible to the advertiser’s needs, yes. However, there are times when PPC is more of a hindrance to performance than a catalyst. For this reason, I wanted to highlight three ways in which pay per click advertising can cost you money, eating a hole into your wallet.
 
 

Experimenting

I find that knowledge in PPC can only take you so far. To gain best results, you will need to experiment to see what variables in PPC affects your target market the most. Of course, the information you gain from experimenting will prove very useful to improving the performance of your actual PPC campaign. Just, the cost of doing this can be quite high. There is no guarantee you will find something beneficial from experimenting – you may find you spend lots on experimenting to gain no valuable information…
The only way to combat this is set out strict objectives and rules when you do experiment in PPC. Limit your budget to experimental campaigns, the time taken to experiment and more. By doing this will help to stop yourself running experimental campaigns for longer than necessary.
 
 

Unnecessary Competition

For the majority of keywords in PPC, their CPC is reflected by a few factors such as the quality of traffic, conversion rate and other habits that the web users adopt as well and your competitor’s PPC. Think of PPC as an eBay listing. The more competition, the more likely the listing will increase in price. The same rule applies to PPC. You may find that your market has an extreme amount of competition which will inflate the CPC of each advert appearing. This is why niche keywords are key to PPC success because they have super low CPCs and still gain high quality traffic.
 
 

Lack Of Change

PPC is constantly evolving. For this reason, you need to make sure your campaigns are always up with the current time, so they can perform at their peaks. There will be advertisers that will set up a good campaign and leave it to run for weeks or months on end without changing a single thing. Yes, it might have been a great campaign at the start converting the traffic well. However, it will be poor at the end of its life cycle because it is not being revised enough to keep up to date with the times. PPC campaigns need attention and without them, you will find your campaigns will be costing more than they are worth.