Why Pay-Per-Click Ads Are Wasting Your Money

 Marketing
May 022012
 

Paid click campaigns are valuable traffic drivers, but they could be doing a lot more considering that half the time they don’t work. Research my company conducted indicates that non-branded paid clicks have a 55% bounce rate from their landing pages. Google Analytics and KISSmetrics reports put the range from 10% to 90% with new visitors bouncing 62.9% of the time from paid search clicks.

What these numbers indicate is that only about half of paid clicks actually drive conversion from new visitors they attract. That is the equivalent of throwing away $.55 of every marketing dollar. That’s not to say paid clicks aren’t a good idea, but rather that they can and should be more effective and efficient.

According to Conductor, an SEO platform, there’s an average online conversion rate of just 2.5% for visitors across all channels. Marketers need to invest in resources that maximize conversion from paid search traffic, often their largest digital line item. In paid search, there are two ways to bid: exact match or broad match.

The choice means most paid search marketers are forced to choose between scale and profitability, depending on how they bid. Exact match can offer profitability but lacks scale and it only wins if the query matches the exact keywords you chose. Broad match includes other content too, which is why it offers great scale, but it’s less profitable because it’s not as accurate.

SOURCE: Why Pay-Per-Click Ads Are Wasting Your Money.