Update February 2007: According to the latest industry research in the months leading up to February 2007 the percentage share of UK searches were as follows: Google 77% | Yahoo 8% | MSN 5% | Ask 5% | Others 5%   Update June 2007: Figures for online / internet advertising spend are continuing the buck the industry trend; according to the latest figures from the Advertising Association. Its Quarterly Survey of Advertising Expenditure revealed that UK online advertising spend was up by 42% to £648m in the first quarter of 2007. This contrasts with all other forms of advertising, including magazine, newspapers and TV, which are all falling. One one the main drivers for online advertising is "pay per click" with the major search engines.

Pay per click advertising

Firstly, a cautionary word about 'pay per click' advertising with search (se) engines. It does work, but you have no way of knowing how many genuine customers are clicking on your advert. Your competition could be sitting there clicking away on your advert costing you money per click (although all the search engines are taking steps to try and prevent this type of fraud).

Quality not quantity is the key with pay per click advertising. Don't go and sponsor general search terms like "marquees" if you are a Winchester marquee company who only operates with a 30 mile radius of Winchester - you may get 90% wasted clicks. Try to be more specific and more selective and limit your expense until you can gauge the success of failure of your advertising campaign.

Update July 2007: We have recently found a useful Google tool called "traffic estimator" which gives a good indication of the likely costs of pay per click. For example the search term "marquee hire" gives an estimated cost per click of between $1.61 and $2.12 for being in the top 3 slots (July 2007).

Taking an average of the above cost estimate gives $1.86 per click (95p on approximate current exchange rates). They estimate 54 to 68 clicks per day, again taking an average you get 61 clicks. So, running a campaign for a year will net you approximately 22,265 clicks (visitors) and cost $41,413 (£21,150 pa).

However, as always there is a fly in the ointment. Google also say that only 1% of searchers click on the paid ads on page one, against 2% clicks on the organic (natural) results on page one. Considering that the marquee and events industry has a high spend per customer, paying over £1,750 a month may provide an adequate return?

Interestingly, being on page one for both the natural search results and the paid results will boost the click through rate to 6%.

It also begs the question that if only 1% click on the paid ads on page one, what percentage click on the paid ads on pages 2, 3, 4...etc? It would seem that a successful pay per click campaign would depend party on how deep your pockets are. Bidding a lower amount to simply appear 'somewhere' in the paid results will probably do you little good.

(Editors note: Many of the lower bidding pay per click ads appear here on our site, so there is extra traffic to be had from sites such as this one. We are not prepared to state the exact click through rate for our Google ads; however, we can confirm that it is much higher than page one listings on the Google search engine. We don't track all our pages, but our click through rate on many popular "key" pages is somewhere between 10% and 35% (impressive results given our average is more than 20 times higher than Google achieves on it's own). Our direct advertisers have a similar, if not higher, click through rate; confirming once again that this site is the best value advertising anywhere on the internet for the events industry.