Hi guys My problem in short is "pay per click doesn't work for me." Since I am looking for a good answer I try to be honest and give full details: I am runing a series of hotel affiliate websites. From every 100 organic visitors I get 1 or 2 bookings. The keywords for the sites costs around $2 above, So I have to pay at least $200 to get 1 or 2 bookings in total between $4 to $10. Now my theory: Pay per click will never work for me becase: It is fine for giant hotel booking companies because when a user follows their links and book a hotel he/she will come back later so they don't mind to pay a lot for keywords. This is different for small sites like mine because we only want to send the users to those giant sites. What do you say?
If you pay $2 it will indeed never work. Go for cheaper KWs or stop PPC altogether (or divert to smaller engines such as Miva where it might be cheaper).
Buy a few days subscription of WordTracker or Keyword Discovery and generate a huge keyword list (several hundreds or perhaps even thousands of keyword phrases). If you create a huge keyword list you can strip out the expensive keywords and target your keywords more precisely. You need a high CTR to make it work. Create very tight ad groups with similar keyword phrases and match your ad copy extremely well with the keywords in each ad group. It sounds like you have a conversion rate of about 1-2% which is pretty normal but you might be able to increase it further with more targeted keyword phrases.
It might be the keywords you are using. Try different/more targetted keywords as suggested above. Atm people may be visiting your site, but finding the site/hotel is not what they were after. Eg is the keyword bringing in traffic from student demographic. But students might not want to stay at the ritz (or can't afford to) but would prefer to camp/few stars hotel/bedsit.
to be honest with you , PPC never works anymore.. in the old days when goto just started i was making a killing.. 20k a month in profits from buying and selling the traffic.. but that was for a short time .. and as soon as others found out.. that idea got killed becouse the bids got realy expensive today.. its never going to work for you .. if you don't have some huge adventage. if you go to miva like someone said .. you will get tons of bots hitting your site, most will not stay long enought for your servers log to even record them.. and they will charge your ass on your CC. so thats not a good idea,... miva is a huge scam what might work is the miva phone number Ads where you pay per phone call their affilates can't fake that, what are they going to do .. fake phone calls? good luck
Have you sacraficed the goat to the google gods yet? they will be displeased with you and rain down fire from heaven on your poor hapless soul if you fail to undertake this important event. Our SE, hallowed be thy algorithm, thy kingdom come, thy domination be done, on earth as it is in google headquarters, give us this click through our daily sustenance and forgive us our QS, as we forgive those who click fraud against us.
No prob man. I like to laugh at life and have a good time, even when things aren't going well at all.As they say....laughter is the best medicine.
Thanks for replies At least I realized that PPC is not supposed to be that easy I guess if I work on SEO I'll get better results than PPC.