For those companies who are fortunate enough to have large Pay-Per-Click (PPC) budgets, effective use of every penny is extremely important. For this reason, there are a number of ways to go about making sure you receive the maximum return on Ad Spend. Here is a quick list of bullets to check off in optimizing and cutting costs:

• AD’s: Does each and every adgroup have at least 3 ad creatives running at once? If the adgroup has not had more than one or two ever, getting up to three or four would be a good idea. If so, checking on the past performance of the ads is a must. Look back for the past 90 days to see the click-through-ratio (CTR) performance on average. Also compare this to the past 30 days performance. Cut the lowest performing one or two. Again do not delete it, just pause it. And create another.
• Relevant Landing Pages: For companies this size multiple locations nation wide or world wide will most likely be hot spots. Finding those geographic hot spots and creating landing pages for those cities, states, etc. will dramatically increase conversions in most cases. People looking for services, products or information will greatly appreciate seeing their local area acknowledged on your site.
• Time Targeting: Effective time targeting for big budgets is Awesome. Most of us have heard of the 80/20 rule in business. For PPC, start off with 80/20 or try90/10. By checking your conversions each hour, you can take the lowest performing 10-20% of the day and bid down during that time frame (this way you can conserve your budget and reallocate during peak performing times). This will help you place higher and/or get more conversions during the peak hours where competition can be tough! You can find the conversions for per-hour breakdown in Google Analytics on the left hand navigation bar by clicking on Goals, then Total Conversions then Graph By Hour.

These are three top tips on cutting costs for large PPC budgets right off the bat. As always, make sure that this applies to your campaigns and then Test, Test, Test and Analyze, Analyze, Analyze. I would also suggest making small changes at a time and then comparing it with month-over-month data. Be careful when making big changes to big PPC budgets. You should err on the side of caution, opting for slow improvements versus throwing a wrench into your currently effective marketing.

For more Help in Optimizing your Large PPC budget: Look To The Right Internet Marketing

As most now know Google is in the TV advertising game. All TV ads are running through Dish Network for now. The user interface for the TV advertising is consistently simple as the AdWords advertising. Still the options we love with AdWords like day parting, budgeting, demographic targeting based on networks, programing etc. However all changes take effect the next day. Great tracking as we are accustomed to from using analytics data. For those of us that have used radio advertising they do have a Market Place for finding people to help us develop our TV Ads. With the Google TV Ads you can block and select the actual programing (show’s) you want and don’t want to show for. I believe this is a great step in the right direction for the control and reporting that small to large business are looking for with TV. Obviously for the cost of creating ads and the actual air time it will be reserved for those companies that can maximize a relatively higher advertising budget with Google TV advertising. I look forward to hearing success stories using Google TV Ads. Noah @ LookToTheRight.comÂ

At times us marketing managers and business owners can get pretty overly unbalanced in our focus of getting more leads and calls in our pursuits. High touch customer service is huge! It will make or break a business. Great customer service will lead to word of mouth business not just eCommerce efforts. “Word of mouth is the most powerful means by which any product or company builds a reputation, and the internet is a medium made for word of mouth.”-Bill Gates Business At The Speed of Thought. This becomes more and more precedent as social networks grow and social network marketing grows. We all have our favorite brands, vendors, and stores we love to frequent and those we don’t. Most times the likes and dislikes hinge on the basis of the quality of there customer service. For all companies that take calls from customers and potential customers need to be highly aware of what kind of conversations are taking place. A high majority of calls will be the basis of impressions made about your web business. How may rings before someone picks up? Is the person warm and receptive? How many times is the call transfered? How long are your hold times? Are the reps knowledgeable? Are the internal reps sales focused? If you are concerned with conversions your phone reps are a huge key to this. A sales focused (or one with incentive(aka Commissioned)) rep will greatly increase over phone sales and sales on the web after those customers hang up. I see this as a big hang-up with a lot of business in the transition to doing more and more business generated from the internet. So make sure you get it right in your organization so your business doesn’t get Hung-up On!