Still worth it, but the offer structure matters as much as the campaign setup.
A lot of the "PPC is too expensive" conversations I see are from people promoting one-time purchase products and trying to make the math work on a single click. That's getting harder. But if you're promoting something with recurring revenue SaaS, subscription services, anything with a monthly billing cycle — the lifetime value changes the math completely. A $30 CPA that converts to a $50/month recurring customer for 8 months isn't expensive, it's cheap.
Rankings Daily's point about treating search as break-even lead gen is exactly right for that model. We do the same we don't measure campaign ROI on first conversion, we measure on 90-day LTV. That's a harder number to track but it's the real one.
The other thing that often gets overlooked: not every niche has the same auction pressure. People talk about "high CPC" like it applies everywhere equally, but there are categories where you can still find low-competition keywords with genuine buying intent. We run brandd-keyword campaigns on SaaS products where we're sometimes the only bidder, and average CPC ends up under $0.10. Not because of some trick, just because nobody else is there.
Campaigns By Mike's note on conversion lag is real tooo — cut campaigns at 7 days in a niche where the product has a 14-day free trial and youll kill things that were actually working. Attribution window has to match the sales cycle.
So yes, still worth it. Just not for everyone and not with every offer.
