Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Search / PPC (Adwords, Bing, etc.)

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Steps to Take When the Suggested Bids Are Too High (6)

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My niche is about how to start a business, and looking at the suggested bids on adwords, I'm not sure if I can buy leads from the search engines. My target is a cost per lead of one dollar or less, which means at a 50% conversion rate I'm looking for clicks that cost $0.40-$0.50. Here is what the suggested bids are:





So from the starting point that the major traffic key terms are out of reach, what are my next steps to find reasonably priced traffic?

Thanks for any suggestions

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Yowch.

First option would be to target Bing, obviously.

Assuming the bids are too high there too, I'd suggest looking for longer-tail terms. Is your niche just about how to start any generic business, or one type of business in particular?

Also, worth considering other traffic sources. Direct media buys would seem like an obvious choice - a pain but worth it if you find a good one.

Organic traffic via viral, social or SEO is another option, although the SEO competition on that niche is pretty fierce too.

It's a competitive niche - good luck!

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Assuming you are a product owner: Your competitors are able to outbid you because they make more per customer. The problem isn't that bids are too high - it's that your lifetime customer value is too low.

So either increase the value of each customer or put in some serious legwork to find the more difficult traffic sources that your competitors haven't tackled yet.

The disparity between the CPCs on Google and the CPCs you are looking for leads me to think its a SERIOUS user monetization problem on your end.

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Thanks and to a degree you're right, I'm being conservative by chasing one dollar leads.

But even if my business had a fully built out backend of optimized offers, it's hard to for an info business to justify paying $20 per lead. I know a few info business owners and none of them pay that much per name.

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Being conservative isn't equivalent to facing facts. I can be "conservative" and chase $0.01 leads for diet rebills but it doesn't mean it will happen. Extreme example? Yes. But the point remains the same. The market doesn't care what you think CPCs "should" be. Or what you think a reasonable lead cost is. The market prices the lead based on how much someone is willing to pay for that lead.

So somebody is bidding $20 CPCs. That somebody is, most likely, making money on $20 CPCs. How? They monetize better then you.

It's hard to make money on info products with $20 leads? Then its time to do things other than just info products. Add some consulting, coaching, and seminars to increase the lifetime customer value. Add anything else in you can to increase the value of each customer. Is there any physical products complementary to your info product? Then add those in! Basically: it's time to step your game up.

Effective monetization is a skill that you NEED to have in order to compete in a market that is capable of scale. If you can make more money on each customer than your competition then you can price them completely out of the game, as you've seen.

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Good post! Just to clarify, my target CPL is one dollar because I'm able to get that on Facebook. Most info marketers I know shoot for a CPL of $.50 to one dollar (Stackman recommends a target CPL $.50 to hold down your risk when starting as a merchant).

That said your points are well taken and a great reminder that I should be focusing on revenues just as much as costs.

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