Two Chocolatiers Try PPC. One Is Sweet, The Other Sour

Netpaths does not recommend businesses start and manager their own pay per click campaigns through Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing. There are too many pitfalls that belie inexperienced bidders, and like a rookie at a poker table in Las Vegas, you will loose your shirt. An article in the SF Gate compares one company that blindly handed Google their credit card number,while the other researched PPC before starting online campaigns.

As Louis Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind, or in this case the prepared pay per click advertiser.

Charles Chocolates, a small artisanal chocolate manufacturer spent $3,000 on pay-per-click ads over a three-month period last year and sold fewer than five boxes of chocolates. So this resulted in a cpa of $750, as each sale cost $750. Some companies can make money spending $750 per sale, but not a chocolate company.

Lake Champlain Chocolates, an upscale Vermont chocolatier, sells about 30,000 pounds of chocolates each year from pay-per-click ads. It doesn’t say what their spend was, but I assume they achieved a more reasonable cpa of less than $30 to remain profitable.

Steps that helped Lake Champlain:

  • bid on a large list of keywords (70,000)
  • do not use the Google content network
  • judicious use of stop words (free, gift card, and my favorite: chocolate covered scorpion)
  • dynamic keyword insertion
  • writing compelling ads that targeted specific users, in this case upscale chocolate buyers
  •  include key selling points in ad text

Do you have what it takes to make money using PPC?

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2 Responses

  1. “Cost Per Action” or CPA marketing is one of the simplest methods for beginner Internet marketers to begin making money online and get paid for the conversion “actions” taken by the traffic you steer to advertisers.

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