PPC (pay per click) profit

Is PPC Advertising Profitable?

The Internet is full of "Get Rich" Quick stories about how to make money fast. Many claim that there are huge profits to be made from PPC advertising. Is this true?

Maybe. For many products, PPC advertising can and does provide large profit for the company or organisation concerned.

BUT... It is also possible to waste a large amount of money through unprofitable PPC campaigns.

This page looks at some of the issues to consider when assessing the profitability of a PPC campaign.

Measuring PPC Profit or ROI (Return on Investment)

One of the great advantages of PPC (pay per click) campaigns is the amount of quantifiable data that is easily available, so measuring the performance of the advertising is relatively easy compared to other forms of advertising. The following information is useful in determining PPC profit or ROI (return on investment):

• Management costs (either costs of paying a PPC management company, or staff time to manage this yourself)
• PPC advertising costs
• Number and value of useful clicks

For some websites, useful clicks are easy to define and measure. For example this might be users who have completed a sale. The value of this may be the sale value minus costs, or it may be higher if customers tend to make repeat purchases.

Many PPC campaigns aim to increase subscribers to newsletters, obtain registrations or simply generate product interest. Different values can be placed on each of these actions, and one campaign may measure different types of 'conversion' (useful visitor). This means that you can calculate the ROI or profit for each different part of the PPC campaign.

What are typical PPC profits?

Larger businesses can often save thousands of pounds by employing the services of people who understand the PPC market in detail.

In many industries, profit from PPC advertising remains high - and appear to be much higher than other forms of Internet or offline advertising. But as more advertisers realise the potential profits of PPC advertising, the competition increases and profits go down (although the PPC provider such as AdWords or Yahoo Search will see profits grow!).

What is more surprising is the number of PPC campaigns which must be running at a negative profit (ie a loss!). Cornish WebServices are aware of several market areas where the costs to advertise a particular product are more than the selling price of the product. This would require very high conversion rates and customer loyalty to be profitable. In such situations it is often possible to find some sub-set of the product that can be advertised profitably by PPC. If not, is is better to use other Internet marketing methods.

Increasing PPC profits or ROI

Cornish WebServices have almost always managed to achieve significant increases ROI for client PPC campaigns - typically of order 40%.

Cornish WebServices have extensive experience in both B2B and B2C type markets (mainly English language based in both the UK and non UK markets) on all the major PPC providers. We also provide natural search engine optimisation services and often offer a combination of services where we gradually decrease PPC spend as the client website gains top rankings.

Contact us for a realistic assessment of the benefits of PPC (pay per click) advertising for your business. We only use qualified Google AdWords Professionals to handle client budgets. We were probably the 1st UK PPC management company to do, and are still one of a very small number that do not allow 'unqualified staff' to manage client PPC campaigns.