For the people who have used any pay per click advertising:

1) Which did you use (google, overture, etc.)?

2) How much did each click cost you?

3) Was it worth it?


I'm itching to give a pay per click scheme a try, but not if it will be a waste of money so any advice/info is greatly appreciated. :)

Check this site out it has tons of valuable information.

www.selfpromotion.com

Our experience in this area has been mixed. We had some early effectiveness with Overture ads over a year ago that ranged from 1 to 5 cents each, and they generated decent amounts of traffic, but over time as Overture made changes to drive up traffic and water down the targeting effectiveness, the sales conversion rate weakened, so eventually we canned those ads.

A few months ago we tried some Google PPC ads at 5-6 cents each. I experimented with different keywords and different wording and managed to achieve some great click-through rates on certain targeted keywords (over 6% CTR), but the sales conversion rate was low. We made back perhaps 20-30% of the cost of the ads, so I ultimately canned those ads too.

Although we rank high on some popular keywords, and we get a decent amount of traffic from search engines, especially Google, search engine visitors have a lower sales conversion rate than our average. Basically, a visitor from a search engine is about half as likely to buy as an average visitor to our site (from all sources combined).

However, I have seen some reports from other ASP members that PPC search engine advertising can be very effective. From my vantage point, it appears that the key is whether or not you have a product that people will specifically look for. For instance, if you sell a solitaire game, you might do very well with people searching on something like "solitaire games." But if you sell a unique puzzle game like Dweep or Stockboy, my guess is that you'll lose money if you bid on terms like "puzzle game." We have quite a few puzzle games, but we've been unable to make a profit with such a general term like that. We can get loads of traffic fairly cheaply, and a great click-through rate, but we just haven't been able to convert such visitors into customers at a high enough rate.

We already rank #1 on terms like "dweep" and "dweep game," so we don't need to bid on those. Few people are going to search on a term like that unless they already know about the game though.

So search engine marketing hasn't been a big part of our strategy. Only around 7% of our traffic comes from search engines. We tend to do best with traffic that has been pre-qualified in some way. For instance, traffic from shareware and game download sites is something we can convert well.

Everyone's experience is different. We've been doing well lately with buying features on download sites, so I've been gradually increasing our marketing budget in those areas. But others who have tried the same featured spots we've done have reported dismal results.

I've been curious about this before Steve, how do you konw where you're users are comming in from? Using session data we track unique visitors to our site and which pages they visit be we cannot tell where they link in from, how are you getting that data?

My experience has been the same as Steve's. I have tried findwhat.com and Overture, and eventually dumped them too, because of low conversion rate...

I put a few hundred a month towards pay per click. I'm not tracking it very closely, but my general impression is that sales from pay per click are generally weak and that my direct return isn't that strong. I tend to stick with relevent keywords to make the traffic as targeted as possible. I'm not using much in the way of "Game Downloads" and stuff which is very general. Something like "Mahjongg Game" for Twilight mahjongg is pretty good though.

I take sort of a more long term view in this. A few hundred dollars on relevent keywords is not much money for us and if it helps build up our customer base (some good customers will stay with us for years) and our general exposure then I don't mind. I'm thinking about canning overture though, mostly because it's a hassle to maintain.

I like google's system a lot better. It's also a great way to experiment with wording and text approaches. Google's feedback and click through rates are great that way. You can try 10 ads for the same product and watch the click through ratios for each and then use the best text in a banner ad elsewhere's or on your site or in your descriptions for the shareware sites and so on...

You can track links pretty easily just by tagging the links like this:
http://www.dexterity.com/?src=google_keyword

Then just create different ads targeting different keywords. You can do this with google and overture. When someone visits our site using such a link, we drop a cookie on their machine with the value of the src variable. If/when they later return to buy, our order form reads the cookie and records it in our database as part of the order data. So we can see what keyword/ad brought them to our site. This works well enough that we can determine whether an ad is effective or not.

We also use these type of links within our game demos, so we can see which demos generate the most repeat customers.

Originally posted by Dexterity
[B]You can track links pretty easily just by tagging the links like this:
http://www.dexterity.com/?src=google_keyword



Yes I do this sort of thing with all my ad links. I'm just not following up on the weblog data as much as I should be. Of course should is kind of a soso word. Truth is I tend to spend much more time developing and working on new projects than I do marketing. I guess you know how that can be...