Our pay-per-click advertising campaign is the main source of traffic to our lead generating VOW solution.  We've been doing it for a year now and up until last quarter things were doing really well.  We have a very attractive site which is very user friendly and competitively I would confidently say we have one of the best MLS search solutions in the the urban Chicago market.

That said, typically we are able to capture 1 sign-up for every 10 clicks we get from our targeted pay-per-click campaigns.  The last quater it was more like 1 in 25.

There is an environmental factor to consider (slow buyer market), but I don't think that is significant enough to change the sign-up rate.  I will leave it up to the active rain community to decide, but I have two possible suspicions as to the reason for this drastic change. 

Possibility #1, as an increasingly popular site we are now on the radar of competing companies and have become the target for click fraud by some unscrupulous brokerage.

Possibility #2, the popularity of Adsense has increased to the point where everybody and their mother has put it on their website (for the uninitiated, Adsense is a widget that allows you to sell advertising space on your website through Google).  Perhaps the clicks coming from some random webpage are not as likely to turn into a lead as a click coming from someone searching on Google.com.

Those are the two possible explanations that come to my mind... any other ideas?

John Marlow
jmar@heliosresidential.com