I’m sure we can all agree that pay per click advertising is one of, if not the, best way to gain contextual traffic online as an advertising platform. It is used in the millions worldwide and suits a wide range of needs by businesses and individuals.
Even though PPC is extremely flexible to one’s needs, it does not always mean PPC is the go to advertising platform for every kind of situation. Here are some examples where it would be a bad idea to run a PPC campaign.
 
 

Long Term Traffic Solution

PPC campaigns can be very costly and are must better suited to being a short term solution to traffic boosts. For those that are looking at gaining contextual traffic for the long term from the same type of keywords (6 months+), it would worth out much better and cheaper for you to concentrate your efforts on SEO.
 
 

Big Campaigns with Little Experience

Even though the concept behind PPC advertising is extremely simple, programs such as AdWords can appear quite complicated to a new comer of PPC. As much as there are articles online, such as on PPC.org, which can help you to learn the ways of creating a successful PPC campaign for the first time, you are still going to make mistakes – it is the mistakes that will help you learn where you were going wrong to begin with and make a better campaign there-on after.
For this reason, if you are new to PPC, always start small by squandering a small budget you don’t mind loosing. Only once you are more familiar with PPC should you then start to concentrate on big campaigns.
 
 

Lack of Time for PPC

Although you can leave a PPC campaign to run for a set amount of time you will need to keep an eye on the statistics of it so that you can react and change elements of the campaign accordingly to make sure your budget is being used as effectively as possible.
For example, if you have found that your average CPC is steadily increasing day by day, you may want to change a few parts of your campaign, such as including more negative keywords, to try and push your average CPC back down to a manageable level.
PPC campaigns can be left to run once started. However, the best campaigns that generate the best ROI are those where the advertisers react to statistical changes, even on a daily basis.
 
 

When You Need Guaranteed Results

As good as PPC is, it still cannot guarantee you conversions. If you require guaranteed results, the best you can do with PPC is set everything up to get contextual traffic to click onto your link with the possibility of them converting – you could still pay for traffic that does not convert you anything.
Saying this, it is understandably difficult to get guaranteed results out of any advertising platform. But, you may look to affiliation as the preferred solution if you need guaranteed results for an advertising budget.