With tough times ahead, measure your advertising results.

For most advertising you may include in your marketing, it is notoriously difficult to prove a Return on Investment (ROI). Printed media or television, without clever tactics, it is difficult to prove results conclusively. This makes it difficult to determine where your next advertising pound should be spent – especially in our current turbulent times when you can’t afford to waste money.

For many businesses the answer lies on your computer screen with paid advertising programs.

Many of you will sigh at this point as you remember burning a hole in your pocket trying to make Pay Per Click (PPC) on Google work and produce some profitable business.

Well folks, I’ve done just the same myself in the past too!

The thing is, we didn’t know what we were doing then and were running blind.

PPC is a skill, just like any other, that needs to be learnt and understood. I waded through hours and hours of video and text tutorials before I took my Google AdWords exam. Even then, knowing the mechanics of the PPC system wasn’t enough. I needed the commercial skill and knowledge I have gained over the years to make it work successfully.

Put those together and you have a powerful tool in PPC. One that can bring absolutely the right people to your website. People who are looking for your products and services right now. All you have to do, once they have arrived, is keep them there and offer precisely what they need (but that’s for another blog post!).

The massive bonus gained from using PPC over other forms of advertising is the measurement, tracking and instant flexibility.

Setup correctly, a PPC campaign will tell you exactly what key words your customer typed into the search engine to look for your product, the advert that attracted them and the advertising cost to gain him as a customer.

Not only that, but you can monitor what’s happening, and more importantly, what’s not working on an hourly basis. That way you can change things before your marketing budget gets burnt to a cinder.

It’s probably that last point that caught us all out before. We didn’t check and analyse what was going on often enough. The result? A sizable hole in our pocket and a dislike of the PPC system.

But times have changed. More and more of us turn to the search engines as our first point of contact for knowledge and new suppliers. That means your business needs to be there for them to find you and PPC provides a manageable, measurable and cost effective way of getting new customers.

If you need to understand or investigate how a well managed Pay Per Click Sales and Marketing Campaign could work for your business then contact me to discuss your Sales, Profit and Return on Investment requirements.