Search Marketing Sage

The barrage of media about advertisers slashing their traditional media advertising (TV, Radio, Print) budgets for 2009 and re-allocating it to online advertising have been coming at a clip of almost a story per day on the subject of late.

As an online marketing agency, we obviously welcome the change and appreciate that our efforts are being recognized by our clients as being more efficient than other forms of advertising. We welcome the idea of finally having enough budget to get a fully budgeted impression share for our PPC Campaigns and trying to find out if the sky really is the limit to online marketing success.

But like everything else in life, there are “two sides of the coin”. Throwing more money at online advertising will also have its repercussions. Problems that I can for see with the shift in dollars to digital include:

• Treating PPC like a traditional “media buy”. Online banner advertising and PPC are not the same and need to be treated differently. PPC performance can be optimized down to the keyword level and should be. We work in the automotive sector and there are some advertisers that are obviously bidding on keywords without caring what results they get. They are optimizing to the media spend and not to the performance goals of the PPC Campaigns. These so called “Branding Clicks” aren’t achieving anything but improving Google, Yahoo and MSN’s revenues. The effect is that costs per click for everyone tend to go up when PPC advertisers aren’t spending with any eye towards common sense.