Pros & Cons of Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a very populat form of driving traffic to a website, especially to a brand new one.

Google Adwords is the leader of PPC engine and I guess followed by Yahoo Search and MSN. No matter which one you choose to start with the process are similar - you decide which keywords you want to target, write an ad and are charged every time someone clicks it.

Anyways, lets analyse the pros and cons of PPC as a traffic source.

Pros

• PPC traffic can be turned on and off instantaneously. Once you have done your keyword research, you can be up and running in less than 15 minutes.
• It is very targeted, since you can decide the time of day and the location from which your ads should be seen.
• Its the ideal method of testing how your website converts. You can run as many tests as you want, with the goal of improving your conversion rate. PPC can help you refine your website before using other traffic sources.
• While in banner advertising you pay by impressions (an impression is when someone sees your ad), in PPC you pay only when someone clicks. This means you are paying only for the actual traffic Google is sending you. 
• Adwords is also a good way to quickly test if there is a market for a new product not yet developed. The marketer can perhaps perform a survey on the landing page to learn if theres interest on a new item/and/or technology possibly entering the marketplace.

 Cons

•  Google Adwords is a very popular way of driving traffic. The more people use the system, the more it will cost to achieve the top position. Depending on how many advertisers are in your market, it is uncommon to go over $1 a click for the top spot.
• You can't rely solely on PPC. It is easier for a competitor with deeper pockets to outid you. 
• Since Adwords seem so easy at first, many advertisers do not invest the time necessary to track the ROI of their investment. They just turn their campaign on. Only by tracking your campaigns, you know which keywords don't convert and can exclude them from your campaign.

Social Media ROI: Myths, Truths, Measurement

Since we are embarking into the social media scene at work, I have been researching on how we measure social media. Question: Is the way you calculate social media ROI the right method? And are you meeting your business objectives and goals? If you answered YES to these questions, YAY!!!

But even that, are you 100% sure you are doing it the right way?

Like my boss, many are still skeptical about marketing via social media and some claim its not really measurable as it's difficult to get the benchmarks and without the metrics it seems diffiult to claim that a strategy really worked. I feel that way, but it might be because I don't have all the numbers to plug in yet.

But for online marketers like me, its a high priority because they:

• need to improve effectiveness
• need to improve integration with other marketing
• feel pressure to report quantified outcomes

But before we discuss the best way to measure our social media marketing, we need to set business metrics which are basically goals and KPIs of our marketing strategies. If its just because "our agency advised us to do it" or "our competitor is doing it too" then, please think about the reasons more deeply.

Examples of some typical social media business goals:

• Gather competitive intelligence
• Engage with customers and prospects online
• Maximise reach of content and messaging in social channels
• Support existing sales and marketing campaigns
• Support recruiting and retention efforts
• Build a customer community to provide support and advocacy

Now to get to ROI, these metrics have to be turned into business benefits -a combination of tracked data and outcome  data, which are not directly connected to social media. e.g. total sales, number of test drive requests, registrations, etc.

I think its quite important to consistently measure ROI of a lot of things..as long as it concerns the growth of our company, in the end we want to knoe whether our investment will pay off or not. Of course its true to listen more to the customers and start engaging with them (by talking with them but first listening  to them). I think this is an investment as well..