This is quite a question and one that I believe depends on what market you are in and what you need to achieve from your website, if you have a long term view and you are time rich but cash poor then Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is with out doubt the way to go, you will not see dramatic results over night but in a few months you can get significant extra traffic by ensuring your site is set up properly for the search engines to crawl through and index.

If however you have a good budget and need to see immediate results then Pay Per Click (PPC) may be the best way to go, it will send visitors to your site from day one and with the statistics packages available you will be able to see the ads that resulted in conversions and the ones that were ignored by visitors.

This brings us to another important down side of PPC and that is that Ad blindness is worse than ever Comscore, the marketing research company shows that 16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web, so the vast majority of visitors from your PPC ads may well have clicked before, this may not be a huge problem if the sales levels are good but it is a disturbing trend.

What percentage of my marketing budget should I allocate for online marketing?

This is a question we get asked a lot, how much should I budget for online marketing, and in truth there is no short answer, it is more about using the resources you have in the most effective manor.

One way to test the water and see if you product or service has an online market place and customers who are ready to buy is to run a small Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign, a few hundred pounds is enough to test the water in most cases – you can use any of the main 3 search engines for this as they all have their own PPC sections.

The accounts are simple to set up you can set a budget for the campaign so you know how much it is going to cost you and once you have the ad and keywords in place you should set up conversion tracking to monitor the results.

One of the best things about PPC advertising is that you can change the settings as the campaign runs making tweaks and changes so that you get the most from your advertising.

Once you have established there is a market for what you are offering you can increase your budget and continue using just pay per click or for a longer term strategy you can invest in search engine optimisation (SEO) so your site can be found easily in the search engines.

So the answer to the original question is as much as you can once you have proven to yourself that it works, using the conversion tracking you can see how much each sale has cost you and from there you can work out the profit per £100 you spend on advertising and work out your marketing budget from there.

How to save money on Pay Per Click

You should be using the search query report that Google offers in its Pay Per Click reports, the search query report will help you identify two important pieces of information that will help you pay less for your clicks, increase conversions and stop you wasting your Pay Per Click budget.

The first thing you should look for are the terms that people have used to convert on your site, this can be completing a form or buying a product. Once you know what phrases people are using to buy your products you can change your keywords and advertisements to match.

The second is what phrases people clicked on but did not convert from, often you will find that people use words that trigger your ads but are inappropriate to your site, as an example we have a client who sells metal storage containers, people often search for the phrase plastic storage container this is obviously not going to be of use to our client as he does not offer this service. So what we did was use plastic as one of the negative keywords in his pay per click campaign, this stops his ads being shown when the word plastic is used in a search query.

Using negative keywords can reduce the clicks on your ads from people who are searching for products you do not offer and it can save you a lot of money on waisted clicks.

If you need help with your Pay Per Click marketing or any other aspect of on-line marketing complete the form on the right or give us a ring on 01747 858002 so we can discuss this in more detail.