For well over a year now, we’ve been using Google Analytics to report our own traffic and give our clients a feature rich, and free way to view their own website statistics. Prior to Google Analytics we used Urchin 5.0, which was acquired by Google and made free just 1 month after we purchased a $900 license for our server. The nice people at Google gave us 50 user account to ease the pain.

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The blind run towards Google Adwords, Overture and MSN AdCenter (the pay-per-click channels) has started to slow down, and rightfully so. For the last few years, we’ve seen companies start with ad budgets of $500 / month only to increase those budgets to well over $8,000 per month in just under a year. These companies know that PPC is increasing their traffic, lead generation and sales, yet they don’t know exactly which PPC is working and which campaigns are just burning funds.

Case in point.
We have a client which sells computer hardware, at their previous agency they spent between $500 – $1000 / month on PPC via Google AdWords. Our client had zero visibility as to which PPC was working and which wasn’t. Once we began working together, we used Google’s Conversion tools to measure which specific terms were converting over to actual sales. In just under 4 weeks we measured ZERO conversions from AdWords, yet there were several orders from other channels.

Does that mean the AdWords is worthless? No, not at all. In fact, Google AdWords did refer traffic to the site and perhaps overtime these visitors will convert to sales, but we have no way to accurately track that data. Google AdWords can be of value as a branding tool. Our client may have not measured direct sales conversions, yet they are appearing in the search results for key terms relating to the business services.

Overtime, the net effect of AdWords, newsletters, press releases and advertising campaigns will ultimately create a heightened brand awareness. When considering PPC be sure to measure your efforts so you can strategically determine if PPC will be a sales, lead generation tool or a branding tool.

Like you, I’ve seen repeat IP addresses visit our sites by clicking on PPC ads. I suspect these repeat visitors who continue to click our ads without moving past our homepage are likely competition driving up our ad costs. I feel that Google and Yahoo should give users the ability to block certain IP addresses from clicking on PPC ads.

Everytime I work on generating a monthly PPC / SEO report for our clients I find myself asking the same questions.

• How much is too much information?
• Do you REALLY need to tweak PPC campaigns more then once or twice a month, once the campaign has been established?
• What is the most concise way to show data?

The more monthly search reports I see from competing search engine marketing agencies the more I’ve begun to notice the trend of “shock-n-awe” reporting. By this I mean reports which are 30 plus pages of Excel data dumped in by some automated program at micro sized type. These reports often include 2-3 paragraphs of human analysis and that’s all.

It seems to me that search engine marketing agencies should be working harder to interpret and condense marketing reports that are catered to clients rather then overwhelming the client with shear stats. Many reports I’ve looked at have ‘interesting’ data but they lack action items or substantive analysis. As this trend continues these reports are beginning to look more and more like the server log files which the report was meant to interpret. Perhaps soon we will see the creation of a new specialist, Search Engine Marketing Report Analyst. A position created just to interpret the search engine marketing reports.

Today I had lunch with a colleague from another interactive agency, and the topic of pay-per-click came up. We started into a discussion about the inconsistent emphasis placed on pay-per-click (PPC) over natural rankings. While both of our agencies provide these services to our clients we began to wonder why it seems that 80% of the interactive marketing budgets go to 20% of the search traffic, while only 20% of the budgets are applied to where 80% of the search traffic originates from.

Is it because PPC provides immediate gratification? Is it because natural rankings appear too difficult to affect change? Perhaps a combination of factors? Regardless, I think it is time that people realize that natural rank is not impossible to influence. While I’m not the first person to state the obvious, it needs to be restated. CONTENT IS KING!

Depending on the products or services you offer, PPC might make sense; however free traffic always makes sense. Pull back on your PPC budgets and use that money to hire content writers, ghost bloggers or technical writers. These professionals will get you far more mileage for your online marketing dollars.