Thread: Why do people do PPC if it doesn't work?

PPC seems to be an area that is a hot topic of debate at CAP.

However, there are sites out there that do PPC, some of whom are CAp members?

Why would they do it if it didn't work?

Who says it doesnt work?

Who says it does work either?


Why do people do it?
To get exposure and traffic and (hopefully) depositing players.

How do you define if it worked?
Tricky. Very tricky.

Making more revenue than you spent on PPC would obviously be the bottom line determination - but for exisiting sites it's hard to work out.

You can see your inbound hits from PPC.
You can see your end of month profits.

You might assume that an improvement in end-of-month profits (or monthly signups) could be attributable to a PPC campaign - but there are hundreds of other variables.

So unless you've got some very fancy tagging and tracking software it is hard to determine actually success or failure if you have an active affiliate site anyway.

Does it work?
For some businesses it can - and does.

Five years ago I helped a friend set up an internet business issuing standard travel VISAs for a country - much like a travel agent does.

It's simple to set up - effectively he is an online only travel agent - and there is a good profit margin is what he does - even though he charges about 1/3 of what normal agents do.

He lives and breathes the PPC model - and it works because it's specifically targetted and he provides a service at a great price that people NEED if they're going on holiday.

He is going to get very few "time-waster" clicks

For him - PPC was an unqualified success and a "spare bedroom" business now employees 5 people - and still produces a nice profit to his pocket.


The other approach would have been the "content approach". Filling his site with lots of related information and getting natural hits.

In this case we decided that he REALLY was not that intersted in the country - or spending the time doing it. We built a pretty static site that answered the questions people had and launched into PPC.

Great reply. I was of the opinion it didn't work because most of the threads I've read were anti-ppc.

Thanks for the interesting story of the start up. It's nice to hear of a small business develop and grow. You must be proud of your contribution.

I suppose its a case of testing and analysing the results and determining if particular ppc campaigns are working.

As they say, you have to speculate to accumulate!

My Bingo Club site was built for PPC back in Feb and has earned me enough to quit my job and do this full time.

Sending traffic to a normal portal as The Gooner says is hard to judge if it works or not with your natural traffic also, but I suppose it all depends how good a catch your landing page is and experimenting on trying to get it to convert.

Not sure if I would just send traffic via PPC to my normal portal home page, I would set up a landing page for it with direct ads and content that the user has keyword searched for.

PPC is trail and error but it does work.

That's great to know. I never really thought of doing a tailored PPC landing page.

PPC was very successful a few years ago when affiliates were bidding on operator's names.

As time has gone by, operators have protected themselves.

Same with everything, it's not working as well because of the level of competition.

But there is still is value for those who know how to do it properly!

Totally no use today. If you are caught, your site will be banned by google and yahoo. online gambling is not allowed to PPC.

Google and Yahoo are not the only places for PPC.

Totally no use today. If you are caught, your site will be banned by google and yahoo. online gambling is not allowed to PPC.

Im sorry but that quote is completely ridiculous.

PPC? Of course it works!

I acknowledge that for the majority of 'casino' based keywords, your ad will be automatically rejected. But you have to research your keywords...create quality landing pages and of course the crux is having to find ways of getting to google accept ur ads