In pay per click advertising, the sooner an Internet user finds what he is looking for the greater chance you have to convert him into customer. This of course achieved through a careful consideration of combination of keywords and landing pages. You do not want, for example, to send a visitor who is looking for digital camera to page featuring computer monitors. Even with a perfect combination of both (keywords and landing pages), in affiliate marketing an Internet user will never arrive to a product just with one click, unless of course you are permitted to sent visitor directly to your merchants website from PPC ad.
When I was interviewed by Fraser, who asked me how did I like the new Panama platform at Yahoo! Search Marketing, I never thought that few weeks later I will find myself ranting in dissatisfaction. For the most part Panama was great. But recently I have noticed increasing amount of clicks coming from websites like these:
I doubt very much that any of these sites are bookmarked as “default search engines” by majority of Internet users. It is obvious that these websites strive on so called pay per click arbitrage, while contributing to an overall poor experience.
I believe Yahoo! Search Marketing needs to eliminate the “minimum” cost per click which currently is at $0.10. They should make it possible for advertisers to bid $0.01 per click (both for the Sponsored Search and Content Match). I am sure there is a reasoning behind having minimum cost per click set at $0.10, but it does allow, in theory, a margin of $0.09 per click for the “(g)arb(itr)age” websites to strive, should their webmasters choose AdWords as the source of traffic.
If you are new to affiliate marketing and thinking to use pay per click advertising, avoid at all cost (at least in the beginning) showing your adds on so called “content websites”. Unfortunately in my case these clicks came from a campaign that had “Content Match” turned off. Yahoo! Search Marketing scored some very low points with me this past week.
That is my rant for today. Hope you are having much better week than I.
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