It is no surprise that Internet Marketing will continue to grow and start taking additional budget dollars away from traditional marketing. It is surprising by how much the current market is expected to grow in size over the next few years. Check out this chart below. Overall Interactive budgets will soar to above $55 Billion. The Internet Marketing Agencies will continue to take business from traditional agencies as online begins to rule the advertising world.

According to our friends at Blogstorm and Forrester Research, a lot of companies are still not taking advantage of organic SEO. In fact, many companies spend 20 times as much on PPC over SEO even though SEO drives 75% of the traffic.  This will begin to change as more companies realize the benefits of organic SEO.

SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.

Here are some recent comments from our PPC & Affiliate Marketing Director, Keith Posehn:

As you may have heard, Google has been on a website banning spree recently. In the last 48 hours, they have apparently banned several thousand accounts – agencies, merchants and affiliates alike. Further, they have given some guidance as to what to expect moving forward.  Here are some key factors to consider for all pay per click advertising and affiliate marketing programs:

1. Isolated landing pages and micro-sites are a thing of the past. When creating an AdWords campaign it is now essential to have a site that is ranked (and ranked well).  Addionally, is is crucial have a lot of quality unique content on these web pages.  Google seems to be placing more weight on content for PPC campaigns.
2. It is important to note that you can have a landing page, but it must be on a ranked and on a trusted domain; also, you should have a link directly to it from a page on the site that ranks well for the keywords being bid on.
3. Paid Search affiliates are largely gone – many affiliates are leaving paid search as affiliates. This is both a plus and a minus, because it means less competition but also fewer affiliates in the various networks.
4. SEO is much more important, even more so than last week!  If a site has no inbound links or trust, it will not be awarded a good Quality Score.
5. Google is not showing its cards in terms of what sites it does not like. There is a great deal of uncertainty right now.  Google is also now entering the market as a competitor directly (i.e. Google Affiliate Network)

What does this mean from an Internet marketing perspective (specifically PPC, Affiliate, and SEO)?

1. SEO and content-heavy sites are now an even more important part of PPC and therefore it is imperative to be pursuing both avenues in an online marketing strategy.
2. Every AdWords campaign needs much more content, trust and quality to survive.  This of course can be provided by Internet marketing companies as well as the brands/clients themselves.
3. A much greater level of research and care must be taken when planning any pay per click campaign.  Many factors must be considered.
4. It would be highly recommended that all e-commerce companies now have an affiliate program on the Google Affiliate Network.

We expect to see more developments over the next few weeks and will keep our readers informed!

Here is what is bugging me today. I really think that less than 10% of people that use Google Adwords have any idea that they can use geo-targeting in their ads or even know how to use the geo-targeting feature. Geo-targeting is essential for almost all ad campaigns.  Let me explain why. Here is an example I came across yesterday that blew my mind. There is a small condo project right next to the campus of a major university in Alabama. They are running broad match terms for the word “condo” in Google everywhere across the country. Their target market is students at this major university in Alabama. In their ad, the descriptions says nothing about where the condo is located. So I searched condos in San Diego and this ad showed up because it was a broad match for the term condo. Their max bid is probably set very high, and they are simply wasting money.

If I was in Alaska, this ad would probably show up too. I almost wanted to reach through my computer screen and grab the marketing person at the condo complex, so I took it one step further. I actually called them and asked about their condo project. They specifically told me they are only marketing to a niche base of students around the university. I then proceeded to ask how much money they were wasting in Google adwords. The sales rep did not know what Google Adwords was: I rest my case. If you are looking to market to a specific group of people in a certain area of the country, make sure you use geo-targeting. For a condo project like that I would recomend the largest condo site on the Internet which is www.newcondosonline.com. It is the only one that focuses on new condo developments. That is my rant for the day. If you do not know what you are doing with the Internet and you want to run an adwords campaign, I urge you to use a major Internet Marketing Company to do the work for you.

-Brandon