But PPC advertising can cost a fortune. It’s easy to get caught up in a bidding war over a particular keyphrase and end up spending far more than your potential return. ‘Ego-based’ bidding, where a CEO/marketer/someone else decides they Must Be Number One no matter what, can cost thousands of dollars. Also, bid inflation consistently raises the per-click cost for highly-searched phrases. This inflation is caused by ego-based bidding and by the search engines themselves, who impose quality restrictions on many keywords. These quality restrictions increase the cost per click even if no one else is bidding. Junk traffic can suck the life out of your campaign. Most pay per click services distribute a segment of their results to several search engines and other sites via their search partners and content networks. While you certainly want your listing displayed on Google and/or Yahoo, you may not want your listings showing up and generating clicks from some of the deeper, darker corners of the Internet. The resulting traffic may look good in statistics reports, but you have to separate out partner network campaigns and carefully manage them if you’re going to see a return. Finally, pay per click advertising does not scale. If you get more traffic, you pay more money in nearly direct proportion to that traffic – your cost per click stays constant, and your overall cost increases. Compare that to search engine optimization, where you invest a fixed amount of time and/or money to achieve a better rank, and your cost per click goes down as you draw more traffic. - Published at Portent, an internet marketing company.

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