PPC vs SEO

Q: Which is more time intensive: PPC campaigns or optimizing my site’s structure? Which would be a better focus for my time investment?
– Joshua

In terms of optimizing your site structure, PPC and SEO are equally important. Where you should invest more of your resources will depend on what your long-term goals are. Regardless of your choice, it’s important that you have the right tools to monitor and analyze both your PPC campaigns and structural SEO efforts.

The reason that PPC and SEO are equally important is because they are both great ways to identify keywords that are relevant to your business and convert traffic into players. As for which channel to focus on, it will depend on your business goals and resources.

PPC is designed to generate an influx of traffic very quickly, it requires a greater initial investment and is good for quickly identifying which keywords perform the best. SEO, on the other hand, offers a longer-term strategy of growing your traffic and revenues – and over a longer period of time helps you identify what keywords work for your website. Some affiliates work with PPC and SEO ‘hand in hand’ by using PPC as a way to determine what keywords they should optimize on their site.

Regardless of your goals, it’s imperative that you have tools that can help you meet them. If you focus on PPC, such tools are invaluable in optimizing your campaigns and maximizing their returns, because the tools are what help keep your PPC spend in check and still see results.

Tracking Your PPC Performance

Whether you’re using PPC as a primary acquisition channel, a supplementary one, or just a means to gather keyword intelligence, you may require tracking reports beyond the click-through rates (CTRs) and average cost-per-click (CPC) data offered by Google Adwords.

What you need as a PPC affiliate are PPC tools that can track what a keyword costs you, how well it converts, and the value of that conversion. After all, the real cost of that click is calculated by comparing what you paid for the click against the revenue that click generated.

For instance, the Income Access affiliate management software features PPC tracking tools that allow PPC affiliates to track how well certain keywords convert for a referral. By using the keywords they’re bidding on to create custom affiliate links, affiliates can view full detailed reports on the players, deposits and revenues being generated by each key phrase. This allows them to measure the lifetime value of players coming in on certain keywords.

As a PPC affiliate, understanding the lifetime value of a player is even more important because you’re paying for your traffic with each word you buy. This is why PPC affiliates need comprehensive metrics on how well keywords convert. Whether PPC is a primary part of your acquisition strategy, or just a supplemental source of traffic to shore up your SEO efforts, understanding the lifetime value of players coming in on different keywords allows you to cut out keyword sets that are costing you money, focus on those with higher conversions, and maximize the return on your PPC efforts.

Structural SEO

Once your target market and keywords are established, you can start optimizing your site for your target market. The benefits of SEO:

The traffic generated will not create an expense per visitor as with PPC.
By incorporating analytics for your content, you can monitor trends and behaviors on your website and get a better understanding your visitors and how to cater to them. There are two effective tools for this: Google analytics and the custom affiliate tracking tool provided by Income Access. With these tools you can identify what is attracting and converting your traffic.

The real key to SEO is time-you need time to build and review the habits of your traffic. Once you collect enough data you will be able to add/change or remove certain content from the site to fine tune campaign results. With these completed modifications in place you will be able to identify which of your SEO efforts are causing an improvement in ranking on the search engines.

With SEO, the amount of data to analyze is quite vast, as opposed to PPC where it’s a simple measure of which ads are generating revenue vs. which are not. With SEO it depends on many more factors: Traffic, sources, page/site structure, value of content, amount of backlinks and the quality of those backlinked sources. When reviewing the results from your campaigns you need to identify the metrics that are most suitable to your business model and use them to measure the success of your search engine marketing strategies.

At the end of the day, the amount of time you should be investing on SEO and PPC really depends on the scope of your market and the variety of services you are promoting.

Tagged as: ppc tracking, search engine optimization, SEM