Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an area I have been looking into lately as I'm very interested in the dynamics of Internet marketing. Mainly my interest, like that of many I'm sure, stems from the fact that the Internet is the largest marketplace the world has ever seen and it is constantly evolving.
Talking to some of my friends who are also thinking about doing some PPC advertising, I can see this is a greatly misunderstood area for most of them. Some seem to think they will just have to pay the cost of admission (their monthly pay-per-click budget) and the business will simply come flooding in.
Unfortunately, website hits do not equal bankable sales.
What happens when you pay for 100 or 1000 hits in a month and no one buys? Maybe you just need more traffic so you up the ante and pay for more PPC. After a while and a lot of cash, you realize that there must be something wrong with your site otherwise that traffic should be converting.
So you decide it's your site that needs tweaking (or worse, a complete overhaul) to get visitors to take the action you need them to take to make back that PPC money that was spent.
Or maybe the problem is further upstream in the process: perhaps the keywords being used are not attracting the right visitors in the first place.
Possibly it is a combination of all of the above factors.
One thing is for sure, while PPC is a huge advance over traditional advertising, it is no silver bullet. I run into people weekly who have spent or are spending (burning?) money with PPC and are not yet seeing the results for which they had hoped. They are getting their hits, but that's it.
I urge anyone who is thinking about getting started with PPC to read up on it while they TEST their campaigns with very small sums until they feel like they are getting conversions to sales.
This way you may still be paying for the education, but you're not shelling out a college tuition!