PPC good for non-ecommerce?

[weirdmonkey]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if someone has tried a PPC campain for a general website (not ecommerce) like a funny/jokes type website, if so how did it go?


Did you're visitor returned after they clicked you're ad ?

Thank you for you're future replys :rolleyes:

[moonshield]

yep, I did a $5 campaign and got a few visitors that have visited several times.

[Chris]

In general its not worth it since content sites cannot make an eCPM nearly high enough to justify PPC spending.

Affiliate only sites could do it, but a typical article driven content site won't.

[Cutter]

Assuming really cheap keywords -- you pay 5 cents per visitor, thats $50 per thousand right there. You are send them to a page where the ads are going to give you more or less the same you are bidding (you could, in theory, send them to a more targeted, high paying ad page but between smart-pricing and low clickthrough rates you wouldn't be any better off.)

So, assume you are pulling in a nice 15% CTR with Adsense on the site, you've made $7.50 after spending $50. Even if you stretch this out and get some incredible CTR with high paying keywords you are still a long way to just breaking even.

You really have to have some end result in mind with each visitor who lands on your site. If the visitor never returns againand/or doesn't tell their friends about your site you are wasting a lot of money.

For example, I ran a PPC campaign for one of my newsletters. Total cost was about 30 cents per sign-up. It wasn't too expensive, but its going to be a while before I see a positive ROI from that campaign.

[weirdmonkey]

So the best way to gain traffic would be to trade links with other humour sites/post in forums ?

Ads on Fark.com ?

Thank you!

[sandman]

I'm doing that now to grow my 4x4 site and it seems to be working. My goal is to increase my userbase and in the Overture campain, I think I am the only forum based site for my keywords. I'll need some more time though to establish a better trend chart.

[dburdon]

I recommend using both Google Adwords and Overture. That way you get to "value surf" between the two systems.

It certainly works in the field of B2B.