I’m currently running a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign on Yahoo (can’t afford Google!) for my new cheap theatre ticket site, which is themed from the main Cheap Event Tickets site.

September is apparently peak booking time for theatre tickets in the UK, so I decided to go for a big push on some of the most popular & well known London shows.

I’ve set up targeted ad groups – for these shows, containing well researched long tail keywords (which all have a decent KEI) and have carefully worded the ads, drawing on existing ads by well established companies in this sector. Most of the ads are displaying ticket prices, so the “clicker” knows what to expect & won’t click just to see what the price is.

Most of the ads are displaying in position 1 on Yahoo (these bids are around £1, on Google you are looking at around £3 for these keywords!!!) & the click through rates are currently between 3.5% & 14%, which I believe is not bad.

So, following all the rules & strategies I’ve read over the last couple of years for successful PPC advertising & marketing, how are the ads doing?

Well, I’ve had ONE SALE, from 44 clicks! Admittedly it was a decent sale & my commission will be £12 from it, but it has cost me £25 to get it!!!! On Google, I’d have paid triple that, without any guarantee of more sales. The companies that advertise theatre tickets on Google presumably make more money per sale than I do, but I still don’t see how they can make a profit when they’re paying such huge amounts for clicks!

It doesn’t seem possible to make a profit from affiliate marketing using Google (or even Yahoo), unless you’re using such obscure terms, that you then really should be able to obtain natural search engine positions for if they’re THAT obscure.

So, once again I’ll be grateful to break even on PPC & would love to know if any other affiliate marketers makes a profit from Google Adwords/Yahoo Search Marketing?!

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