PPC Return on Investment

After wandering the endless array of travel related stands at the Tourism Indaba in Durban this weekend, it was very interesting to get a feel for the varied levels of understanding of online marketing.

Those who were new to the concept of marketing their properties or services online had heard of “optimisation” and had a vague idea that it meant being found higher up on the search engines. What was intriguing was that very few (of course I do not refer to the obviously web savvy companies of the tourism industry!) marketing managers had heard of PPC and even more intriguing was that Google has so cleverly designed their search pages that a large percentage of people don’t even know that the “sponsored links” are indeed “paid for advertising”.

I always advocate that you have to have a balance between SEO and PPC but for so many people competing for the same travel dollar, I find it strange that marketing mangers have not made the leap to PPC. Yes, it can be costly but your return on investment is not only instant but it can be controlled and manipulated according to the capacity of your business.

I am by no means knocking SEO. But if you have a small to medium business and do not have the resources to spend on web staff salaries or wait for your large sums of SEO budget to pay off and slowly climb up the highly competitive travel ranks, then PPC is a great solution.

While the cash outlay can seem scary at first, the agency you use will usually pay Google directly and then recoup the costs from the client at the end of the month. So even in your first month of PPC advertising your lead generation (or enquiry numbers) could cover your PPC advertising spend.

While I understand that cash flow is an issue in smaller businesses the old adage of “you have to spend money to make money” is part of the attitude that makes for successful marketing people and business owners. Spending money on PPC is not only a highly targeted form of advertising your product but it can yield instant results, it’s trackable and you can immediately see if its working for you.