Pay Per Click Testing--Direct Marketing, Mail Order, E-commerce News

Direct Marketing, Mail Order, and E-commerce News from the National Mail Order Association

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Testing Three Sources Of Pay-Per-Click Traffic

A Pay-Per-Click Test

The days of targeted PPC traffic for penny per visitor are
over. There are just too many competitors bidding up every
profitable search term on the major PPC search engines in
today's market. Still... there must be a way to make a
profit in this highly competitive market.

The Answer Is Testing!

If you are buying traffic from PPC search engines (or
anywhere for that matter), you absolutely must carefully
track each and every click! You must keep track of sales
and revenue produced compared to the cost of every single
click. It's vital to the success of your business.

The tools you'll need to accomplish this task are a decent
head on your shoulders and a good traffic tracking
software package. For the most complete tracking, I
recommend higher-end packages like ClickTracks.

Once you have a decent method in place for tracking your
visitors and what they do when they get to your site, you
need to sign up for a number of different sources of highly
targeted pay-per-click traffic. A great resource for
managing many different PPC search engine campaigns is
Atlasonepoint - give them a look.

For this test, I chose three different PPC traffic sources.
I started with the well-known Overture. After selecting
a tightly targetd group of keywords, I jumped through all
of their required hoops to prove that each keyword was
relevant to my web-site. This source of traffic is very
time-consuming, but is considered one of the most reliable
and high quality sources of PPC traffic.

Next I set up and managed/tweaked a PPC campaign at
Google's AdWords. This is a bit more difficult to grasp
than a normal "highest bidder gets the spot" PPC search
engine, but I feel like I've gotten a very good grasp on
the challenges of AdWords by reading/listening to the
Google AdSecrets program offered by John Gorecki - I
highly recommend it.

Then I set up a campaign at the lesser known Marketing
Blaster (MarketingBlaster.com). This isn't actually a PPC
search engine. It is a form of advertising known as
"contextual advertising". My ads were shown on a network
of sites instead of as the result of search on a search
engine. This is similar to Google's Adsense program.
In any case, this was by-far, the easiest campaign to set
up.

Okay, let's get to the numbers.

My average cost per click on Overture was 88 cents. Yes;
that's a significant cost-per-click, but to get the volume
of traffic I received from the other two systems, it was
what I had to bid. This was a fairly competitive market
I was testing.

I received a total of 240 visitors and 3 orders. That's
not too bad. The conversion rate was a little over 1%
and my total cost for the three orders was $211.20.

Google AdWords fared considerably better. My average cost
per click was only 47 cents. Out of 320 clicks, I got 8
orders; which is a 2.5% conversion rate. Very nice! So
those 8 orders cost a total of $150.40 - a dramatic
difference in result.

MarketingBlaster was a very different story.

Out of 1000 clicks, I got 42 order completions. That's an
amazing 4.2% conversion rate! Not only that, but the clicks
only cost 10 cents each; for a total of $100. Really an
amazing value.

It's hard to say all of the factors that contributed to
these results. It's not really possible to compete these
sources exactly head-on. They all have their differences
and some tweaks here and there could result in a different
winner. The point is that you must track and test so that
you know what traffic sources are working best for your
product/service.

The bottom-line in this test however was that
MarketingBlaster.com blew away the competition. I will
definitely be starting with them in future campaigns and
adding other sources later. I will, however, continue to
track and test and look for a new contender. That's how
you win at this game!

Happy Clicking!

-Nathan

Nathan Anderson is an internet marketing consultant and
SEO expert. He is author of Search Engine Optimization
Tactics and co-owner of the SEO Club, which can be found
at http://www.SEOclub.com