Google Adwords is a great tool for driving traffic to a website, especially an e-commerce site. It creates a quick and easy way to reach a search audience by creating an ad and bidding on a set of “keywords”. But, because it’s easy and delivers results, more people are using it, which is driving up the click-through charges.

It’s worthwhile adding that a lot of these people are lazy and unskilled, bidding on the most generic terms and throwing money at it - Google must be drooling. I had a meeting with a charity a couple of months ago who assigned themselves a £500 budget and got through it in less than a month. When I checked out their account, they had one advert with 5 very generic terms and had paid a hell of a lot per click-through. The sad thing was the words were so generic that they didn’t actually apply to what their charity does.

When dealing with clients, what I have found interesting is that many of the corporates still view pay-per-click as advertising in the traditional sense of the word, ie. stick up an advert and send it over - let’s go for numbers. And, because of that they don’t mind spending thousands of pounds a month to drive traffic to their site.

Yep, than can be done, but when the visitor gets to their site, the process is broken, the information is not clear - basically the experience is lacking. So, the traffic shoots up, but the sales or leads don’t come in.

But, suggest they take their marketing budget and spend it developing the website and it doesn’t seem to register as worthwhile!

A lot of marketing people still seem to see a website as another piece of collateral, like a brochure. “It’s done, I can see it so let’s move on to the next piece.”

So, ask yourself, do you even know what you are getting? Do you know the parts of your website that work, or don’t work? You could start by loading on a good stats package - Google Analytics (free) or my favourite is Hitslink. You could also start to actually talk to people. Ask them to be frank and become objective about their responses. The old analogy of the “weakest link” on a website is so, so true. If you can start to fix the broken stuff, then the marketing may look after itself…