Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

I had advertised with Overture and Google PPC since its inception, about 4 or 5 years ago. Early on the ROI was very high but as more and more people discovered the internet as a venue for selling merchandise it began to dwindle.  Bidding wars for top positions ensued. Costs began to rise. Still, I stayed with it.  But my costs increased dramatically and my visitors and sales dropped dramatically about a year ago, almost simultaneously all the talk about click fraud was dominating magazines like this one.

I wrote dozens of letters to both Google and Yahoo (Overture) questioning my bills... how could my bills be so high when my visitor stick rate had fallen so dramatically?  In the "old days" the average visitor stayed on my site to view at least eight pages, but as the costs grew the average visitor stayed only long enough to view one page, the title page.  Smells of click fraud, doesn't it? More visitors, less stickiness, and higher costs.  Hey if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck.......

Finally about two months ago I decided to wing it... drop the PPC advertising altogether. And you know what? Nothing terrible happened. I run about 30 keywords and when I test them from time to time I find that my site shows up in position 1, 2, or 3 in the free listings on most of the major search engines. For some reason, it varies.

The free listings, I pay nothing for them.  In fact I think my activity has improved somewhat, my sales are up and my orders average bigger than they did when I paid for it.  I can tell you this:  my profit is way up as I do not have to pay all those PPC bills. For the amount I was spending on PPC advertising, I had to do in excess of five figures every month just to cover the PPC costs. And not every month covered it, I was actually running in the red for awhile. Now, I don't.

My activity is still coming in from all over the USA and many foreign countries. I also seem to be getting a higher grade of computer literate customer, when I answer their techno questions they know what I am talking about. The ones that came in from the PPC ads considered themselves as contributors on the internet because they could send an email to their mother.  But could not understand cache overload or what a cookie was for.

The only major change seems to be my costs, and concerns over ROI, and the sick feeling knowing that I was being cheated, wondering how many others were suffering the same way and feeling so powerless to stop it. Now, I sleep nights, very content.

Despite what these PPC engines would have you believe, I still maintain that the Emperor has no clothes.

Robert Bass
www.jewelex.com