Google – Still the biggest bang for your marketing buck?

In a previous post….. I mentioned how budgeting for your online marketing spend based on expect ROI and customer lifetime value per vehicle (a valid and very worthy exercise) …..Inadvertently sends the major of your spend/budget to Google PPC.

This has been occurring, easily, for the past 3-4 years. Thus, Google’s net worth has been growing at astronomical levels.

However, something has changed. Google PPC is not returning the ROI, conversions or quality traffic that E-Retailers have grown accustom to. Thus, there is a minor sea change occurring amongst some small pure play online retailers. While this is a “small” change, we should note, these pure players usually “get it” first.

Read this Money article on Ice.com, Ebags and others. I find it very interesting that retailers are sharing there % of spend on Google and plan on decreasing it.

“Although Ice.com reported an increase of 70 percent in holiday sales, Gniwisch said it was "without the help of Google. In fact, [it] failed quite miserably," he said.”

Also, there is no mistake that while this is occurring Google and Yahoo are changing their PPC programs to link ad relevancy and quality landing pages to their ranking/cost algorithm.