PPC vs. Banner ads

[Gavski]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to to these forums but not to the issues surrounding them. I work principally as part of a company web team responsible for x/html design / css / multimedia and web development. As part of this, one of my responsibilities is obviously SEO, and increasingly over the last year due to the nature of some of the projects we have worked, SEM.

Naturally, I have a budget for this and have gained pretty good results via PPC which has given a good ROI so far.

For an upcoming project, an external marketing company has been employed to deal with the marketing side of things, and have basically intimated that they are going to scrap PPC in favour of banner ads!! Basically, they are trying to gain control of my proposed budget to support their own banner ad campaign.

Through my own research into SEM, I know that PPC offers the best ROI but I need to put a case together at a meeting next month in which they are present to support my argument of PPC vs. Banner Ads.

Can anyone offer me any links to evidence / advice regarding this which might support my argument that PPC is a better option than banner ads??

Any help / advice would be appreciated.

Gavski

[Jonathan Mendez]

I would propose to simply run a test. Don't couch this as if you are looking to protect your territory but simply that testing is an important part of any online marketing strategy, especially when any new creative is involved.

Run the campaigns in parallel for a week or two and once you have a good amount of traffic from each look at the conversion rates and more important the cost per order. We know search will perform much better and the media company will have a hard time justifying their budget when it costs 20x or more to acquire customers/leads than it does through search.

Maybe you'll even get more budget! Good luck.

[Gavski]

Thanks Jonathon,

That seems like a sensible idea. I feel that the external marketers are perhaps more used to dealing with clients who do not challenge them on their ideas. They've even claimed recently that PPC does not work as competitors sit around clicking on their rivals ads all day to bankrupt clients! It could be that they have traditionally dealt with non-internet related marketing and hence do not understand fully alll the concepts involved.

[baccahus01]

CPC in general works better than banner ads. The banner ads that work are those that cover large portion of screen and are placed in between a transition page. Look at Yahoo mail the top banner gets few clicks compare to the a monster banner after you seen or sent and email.
My company sees significant better results form CPC targeted keywords than banner ads. CPC allows for the visitors to find what they are looking for quicker and with better accuracy in the subject matter.

[scott]

it sounds like this firm is trying to use your budget for their own gain. are they specifically a sem firm or is sem just part of their business? a lot of online agencies are starting to offer sem as part of their offerings, but don't necessarily have the proper expertise in that area. i've never heard of anyone suggesting banner ads are more effective than ppc. ppc may not work for some specific products or services, but i doubt that what wouldn't work on ppc would work on banner ads. i'd be interested to see what research your agency is pointing to now that would make them suggest this.