Study: PPC Ads Mostly Waste of Money

This one’s a real beaut: Crystal Semantics conducted a survey revealing that 80% of Web users find that most search ad links seem to be “bizarrely unrelated to the search”, therefore ignoring them.

Professor David Crystal, chairman of Crystal Semantics, said: “Existing techniques provide too many poorly targeted results and are not providing value for money. What is clear is that if online advertisements are more applicable to a user’s needs, they are more likely to clickthrough and become a potential customer.”

Well, let’s do the maths: what all this effectively boils down to is that almost every dollar spent on PPC ads is a dollar wasted, no more no less! Add click fraud issues, minimum spend requirements, management overhead etc. and it quickly becomes apparent that not only are the PPC providers in deep trouble – equally importantly advertisers had better rethink their marketing models fast.

Perhaps some traditional, long term SEO with its typically sustained results and no hidden costs might not be such a bad idea after all? May we suggest looking into an industrial-strength IP delivery setup for highly competitive industries?