1. With significant traffic, the advertisers will be attracted to the program.
2. Advertisers will attract other advertisers (competition).
3. Competition means that advertisers will bid more on a term forcing click prices up.
4. Click prices go up, attracting more advertisers and the cycle starts again.

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1. The campaign is too conservative; or
2. The campaign is too aggressive.

Conservative

What do I mean by conservative? Well in the course of setting up a PPC campaign, the user is given the task of selecting / creating:

1. Geographical distribution;
2. Number of keywords/terms to use;
3. Bid price levels;
4. Effective advertisements / descriptions;

In any one of these areas, if the user who sets up the account is too conservative, then the traffic they receive will not reflect the true traffic potential. The user may now walk away from PPC thinking that it doesn't deliver the promised results of increased sales or visitors. The only saving grace here is that they probably have not spent a great deal of money, due to their conservative approach, other than their value of their time.

Aggressive

On the flip side, imagine that the user sets up the same account and takes an aggressive approach on the 4 points above. What a difference this will make! The site will receive a lot of traffic but the expense of the campaign will outweigh the returns. This is usually due to the high level of poor quality traffic that such an approach generates.

Again the user may walk away from PPC advertising, with an even more bitter taste in their mouth, because they have spent (potentially) a great deal of money and time on the campaign. They will feel very jaded towards Pay Per Click advertising as they believe it generates a very poor return on their investment.

The Middle Ground

Is there a middle ground? Well yes there is as all experienced search engine marketers know. Unfortunately many of these have already dealt with the issues of being too conservative or too aggressive, but have finally found their patch of middle ground. They are also the people who persevere in the effort to get things right.

However, most business owner are not like that. So what are the options for them?

1. Give up on PPC and miss out on sales;
2. Outsource to a search engine marketing consultant; or
3. Consider a fixed traffic plan.

Each of these options has pros and cons. The flexibility and individual attention given by a SEM consultant is offset by the high cost. Option 3 is a fixed cost but doesn't necessarily provide the flexibility of option 2.

To a hard core search marketer, the fixed packages like ineedhits Clicks4Sure service doesn't appear to make sense. They are not a good option if you have the time, the patience and the skills to do it yourself. In the same way paying for the oil to be changed in your car doesn't make sense if you are mechanic. Personally, I pay for the oil in my car to be changed as I don't have the time to do it myself.

The same concept applies with Clicks4Sure - it is a totally outsourced Pay Per Click program that provides guaranteed traffic with little risk, money upfront and best of all, is a set and forget program. Whilst you may pay more per click, the time savings and the security of the program easily outweigh the extra cost.

It all comes down to your comfort and skill level.

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Although guaranteed placement programs such as ExactSeek Featured Listings guarantee your site will appear on the front page for specific terms and Google Adwords will guarantee your placement depending on your bid, does this necessarily mean you will get an even spread of traffic between the two?

In a survey conducted by iProspect * that surveyed 1,649 people, there were mixed results on which set of results users considered to be more relevant to their query. In this case 72.3% of Google users picked the organic results to be more relevant to a query while 71.2% of MSN users picked paid advertising as the most relevant search. Across the four main search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL) 60.5% of users preferred organic results over paid results for relevance.

So why the big difference between MSN and Google in perceived user relevance in results? Could it be that Google's organic listings are better than MSN's or do the users of each search engine perceive relevancy to their query differently?

Being an experienced search engine user, I am split over which set of results (Organic or Paid) I prefer to click when performing a search, but then again it also depends on the type of query. If I am researching information, I will usually click the organic listings as I have found these to have the more relevant results. On the other hand if I am looking to buy something online, most of the time I look at the paid listings. Paid listings for e-commerce also tend to have websites with accurate pricing as it is logical that someone paying for clicks would also invest in keeping their website up to date.

Another advantage of paid advertising is that it has helped smaller companies gain prompt exposure and compete with the bigger dominant companies, as compared to slowly optimizing their pages over time. Most forms of paid advertising will guarantee your position in search results but this does not mean they will attract the right type of potential customer that will purchase your product or service by merely being in a higher position than your competitor. A mix of both forms of advertising is vital for success.

If you have found your organic listings are bringing you the traffic you want then stick with it, otherwise take a look at our Clicks4Sure service.

* Statistics taken from iProspect May 2004

This article was written in conjunction with George Gavalas, ineedhits Search Engine Optimization Specialist.

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