Rachel wants to know about the benefits and risks of PPC direct to merchant:

“I was just wondering if any of you thought that one could make a living purely by doing PPC?  We have a few sites, but are looking into concentrating solely on direct to merchant PPC and wondered what all of your experiences have been like with this?

Have you found that it’s better to build your own sites and then PPC direct to your landing page so you have control and get the benefit of natural search?  Or have you found that direct to merchant PPC is faster, more profitable and has a quicker turn around time should you be penalised (e.g. if you were running a site that got a google penalty, you would be looking at trying to rectify it and this taking a few weeks min; with ppc direct to merchant obviously you can change this in a few hours).

Thanks a lot

Rach”

Here’s what the Docs had to say:

Shane

Yes, a very good living can be made purely by PPC and it’s possible via direct PPC or building your own sites, or a mixture of both.

Doing Direct PPC is hassle free and fast to get going, but your revenue dies the moment you turn the traffic off and the cookies run out.  You could also be competing with one or more affiliates for the right to use the display URL, so your bid may end up higher than it would be if you were sending users to your own site, as your ad would feature alongside the direct ad being used by other affiliates sending their traffic direct.

On the flip side, doing a site which you then PPC to has benefits in that you are creating something which will be bookmarked and referred by word of mouth to friends in many instances.  It could also be used to harvest email addresses and build up a loyal user base which are emailed regularly.  This type of site would grow in intrinsic value as its user base grew and could be sold off at some stage for a tidy sum depending on the sector.

Your own site could also get natural listings and thus free traffic.  However, on the adwords side of things, Google could flick the affiliate site switch and deem it unworthy if they saw fit.  In these situations, your quality scores would drop to 1 and you’d be asked for silly money per click, so it’s not wise to get too attached to sites lately.  Some people now concentrate on a core site for SEO/Brand building which they don’t PPC to, but they then use throwaway domains with the same database content etc. for PPC purposes.

I guess it depends how you want to play it personally as to which way to go.  Direct PPC is quick yet only works well whilst the ads are running – there’s no value being built and you are solely bouncing clicks through and taking a onetime kickback.  With your own site it’s much more work, but value gets added with each user who registers and there’s the chance to get SEO listings.

I personally made the mistake of doing far too much direct PPC in the early days whilst others were doing it to their own sites.  As an example, I was sending around half the volume direct as a friend of mine who was sending traffic via his site … he later sold the site for well over a million pounds!!!

Kieron

10 years ago it was very easy to make a living entirely from PPC, I should know, I made a great living from it.  Back in those days you could brand bid until your heart’s content, send traffic straight to merchant or via your very own crap landing pages.  All at 5p a click   However … Google put a stop to most of that, merchants and affiliate networks matured and terms and conditions went from being half a page long to the equivalent of War and Peace.

On saying that however, there are still opportunities to brand bid, send traffic direct to merchants etc., but you have to look a LOT harder to seek them out.  You are right when you say PPC is instant, but beware that Google can “slap” you at any time and put your 10p bids up to £10.  Just as equally a merchant can close their programme, change their terms or drop you.  Instantly.

My advice would be to have a healthy mix of PPC and sites that get traffic via natural methods.  That way you’re not reliant on 1 channel bringing in the cash.  Trust me, after years of spending millions on PPC, when you start to see natural traffic and sales coming to a site for “free”, it’s the best feeling ever.

Kier

Hi Rachel.

It’s certainly possible to live on PPC alone, but if you already have some successful sites why would you want to get rid of them?  I’d advise keep your sites, maybe work on them less if you want to develop the paid search side of your business but don’t rule out natural traffic altogether.

Landing page vs direct to merchant will depend a lot on the product you are selling and the merchant involved.  Direct has the advantage that you don’t need to spend time building a site but a well constructed landing page can presell effectively, increasing your conversions.  As such, a good method is to try a merchant/product with direct and if it works well, then consider building some landing pages for them to try and increase your profit.

Mark

Direct to merchant PPC will have a better conversion than to a landing page, but please make sure you check every merchants restrictions on the use of Brand Bidding, and also restrictions on use of display url.

If a merchant restricts use of url, then you can alwys build landing pages for products or services, and if these are targeted well, they can return a good conversion.

When building landing pages you don’t have to stick to one merchant, you could list 4 or 5 that offer that product or service, you could also consider using Easy Content Units to add some nice formatted content units from more than one merchant on your page.