If you’re an advertiser then it’s a pretty good time to be involved with Pay-Per-Click advertising. My own personal experience is that I’ve seen costs coming down since the beginning of the new year and that’s always a good thing. On the other hand if you’re a publisher then times are not as good. This is what I want to talk about today, I know I’m suffering but I wonder just how much everybody else is suffering as well?
Being paid for a click is the second easiest way of earning money from your traffic, obviously the easiest is to be paid for each advertisement impression whether it be clicked or not. PPC involves little commitment from the visitor, just a measly little click – then you earn. Because it’s so easy it is only natural to become over reliant on it as a way of monetising your traffic, lets face facts here, without the PPC ads from Adsense many of us would not be online trying to make money. It was those huge cheques for $100,000+ that drove so many people to give internet marketing and making some cash online a go.
That was then, this is now. Just before Christmas I was quite heavily into the Digital Point Forums and if there was one thing that dominated the Adsense section it was people complaining of falling revenues. I didn’t see it myself, I’d stayed pretty consistent. Unfortunately for me I’d missed one key factor, traffic. My traffic was always on the up (thanks to tactics like this one). So more traffic to my more general websites plus the fact I operate in some high value/low traffic PPC niches seemed to serve me well and the bottom line was staying around about the same. This was all false. If I’d have bothered to look at the eCPM figures (what I was earning per thousand impressions) which I’ve now done I would have seen the beginning of a slide that is now well and truly in place. In the past 5 months my eCPM with Adsense alone has dropped nearly 60%!
It’s not just Adsense either, this seems to be affecting my PPC across the board. Kontera got so bad that when my guaranteed deal with them ended I had to stop using them altogether. There really was so no point. Then there is InfoLinks who I have championed, mainly on the tremendous eCPM compared to other in-text solutions. I’ve seen their rate drop almost in half, they are just about at my cut off point now where I have to make the decision of if it is or isn’t worth disrupting my content for such little money. There is always the thought with PPC that any money is better than no money but I don’t think that’s wise. As soon as I start seeing a consistent eCPM below what I consider to be acceptable then I lose that advertising and try something new.
Now all this could just be coincidence and it might just be that the niches in which I operate don’t have the same value. What I would say is that the high value ($1+ clicks) are still out there, they are just in very competitive and low traffic markets. In the more general, everyday niches I am now seeing the tumbling of PPC income that many publishers were reporting at the beginning of the year. So what about all you other publishers out there, how is your PPC holding up?
4 Responses to “The Current PPC Market”
Jeet
May 25, 2009
I have seen a HUGE drop in my earnings, at the same time I am still paying $1.5 per click for some of my campaigns. I have often found number of clicks increasing whenever I made layout changes.
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|Marguerite
May 26, 2009
My Adsense earnings had been dropping for some time now even though my traffic had increased. But May has been a good month so far, my Adsense earnings are up again. Maybe it’s due to the fact that summer is near and for some kids school is already over (I get a lot of hits from teens). But Kontera is another story, my earnings started dropping in March they went down by 50%.
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|R Kumar
May 27, 2009
Indeed there is a drop in PPC income over the past few months. Though my income from PPC, especially Adsense has not been that considerable, there is still a fall in the revenue. This is not just the case with Adsense but is the same with all PPC ads. As a matter of fact, when you wrote in the initial part of the post that advertisers are benefiting, I have yet not seen a benefit in terms of PPC advertisements. I have been using various PPC ads to promote my products and I have not seen a decline the PPC cost there. This makes me assume that the advertising companies might just about be cutting down on their share to the publishers and not the actual cost of the ad.
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|Paul B
May 29, 2009
It’s funny because I’ve definitely seen a lowering in what I’m paying for certain keywords. I guess it all just depends who saturated a market is. The point you raise about the PPC companies keeping more for themselves is an interesting one, i guess that’s the whole problem with this industry, it’s all very secretive (nobody knows for sure what the other party is making out of it).
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