Pay per click prices and small business
The rising expense of pay-per-click (ppc) advertising is becoming prohibitive for small businesses, and as a result some are decreasing the proportion of their advertising budget that goes toward ppc. Instead, they are turning to companies like HubSpot, which divide their advertising budget into pay per click and other methods of advertising, including optimizing a page’s potential to be chosen by a search engine. These trends relate to the pricing of pay-per-click advertising, as well as search engine optimization using the hub and authority update rules.
In the article, a small business owner chronicles his journey with ppc. At the start, the advertising was cheap and was very effective, so the seller had a high value per click and the low prices resulted in good payoffs. For a while he was increasing his spending on ppc, so he was entering getting well situated slots. However, soon the price of the slots started going up, until it was double what he was originally paying, but the traffic to his page was not increasing significantly. Advertisers were also getting more competitive with the quality and relevance of their ads. This meant that his value per click stayed the same, but as the prices of the clicks went up his payoffs went down, resulting in him getting less popular slots until he was breaking even and not actually making revenue from the advertising.
This is when he turns to a search engine optimization company, which then starts working with the pagerank of his site. This has become a common strategy, as being higher on the list of results for keywords will naturally make more people visit the site. In order to achieve this, the companies referenced in the article suggested investing in social media like blogs and facebook. They suggest this because connecting to these pages will cause them to link back to the site that is trying to advertise, which will increase their authority score, especially since pages like facebook have high hub scores.