10 Reasons Why CPC advertising Sucks So Much.

Posted on 14. Jun, 2007 by Chad in Online Advertising

10 Reasons Why CPC advertising Sucks So Much.
This post was inspired by the panel I spoke on yesterday as the SES conference.  When I was first asked to speak at this show I was promised that I would be pitted against Google on one side and a Yahoo on the other.  Once I got there, I realized that there was unfortunately no Googlies to bash.  Not even once in the audience.  Big surprise there.  I’m pretty sure that Google feels it has nothing to learn by attending trade shows.  It knows all.  It reads my f’ing email after all.  
To my surprise it was not Google that was taking a bashing (except from my speech), but it was YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing).  There were a few audience members that wanted blood spilled.  They were ranting about how Yahoo ripped them off for tens of thousands and after they finally got in touch with a human, they threw them a few hundred dollar bone.   Ouch!
OK, so here goes, I’m going to do this post Letterman style and count them down.
#10 CPC billing systems seem to ding your credit card constantly.  $50 here, $7000 there, $0.89 next.
#9 Your account rep does not give a crap about your stupid little company unless you are billed 20K a month.
#8  You get charged for each click.  This one is obvious, but the reason it sucks is just that.  You get billed every time someone clicks.  Not with CPM. Not with fixed monthly rates.  Only with CPC.
#7  Buddy clicks.  Yah, you could sorta call this click fraud, but who is going to know?  Hey bro can you click on my AdSense when you come to my site, and I’ll click on yours?  Click $3, thanks.
#6 Competitor clicks.  Exactly click fraud, but a more spiteful kind.  Every time you log on to a computer from a different wi-fi or a different time zone.  Bam!  Hit em’ where it hurts, and click on that $30 keyword.
#5 The arms race.  Oh yah, found that sweet keyword that no one ever thought of.  0.20 sweeeet. And next week it is $5.00 and a month later Google disables your keyword and say to raise to $15.00 to re-activate it, cause weez got feed our peeps foie gras the cafeteria
#4 Grandfather bids fade away.  Yes the coveted five cent clicks that you have tucked away at the bottom of your account.  Bids that you have had for years before minimums got bumped, so you never touch them, never raise them.  But, they just slowly fade away…
#3 Your brilliant ads are plastered all over splogs everywhere and the poor suckers who found the site and clicked on your ad were just looking some… REAL CONTENT!
#2  Your CPC Ads randomly stop running.  Why?  Cause you’re not losing enough money.  Bid more and we’ll turn em’ back on biatch
#1  Click Fraud.
Enough said