It’s now official, $43 billion will be invested over eight years by the Federal Government and private sector to create a super-fast national broadband network; it’s reputedly the single biggest infrastructure project in Australian history.

Most industry pundits and telco insiders were blind-sided by the decision this morning, when Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced that none of five bidders for the national network - including Optus and Melbourne group Acacia - were up to scratch.

However it is expected academics and computer scientists will applaud the decision which will provide most parts of Australia with a cutting edge world competitive 100 megabits per second broadband network.

Small business will also benefit: when questioned by this columnist many operators pointed out this is massive step in the right direction to improving productivity for the growing home based sector.

Your Online Community, publishers of this e-magazine, join the chorus of government well wishers and express the hope that ‘on the nose’ TELSTRA will not do anything to hinder the much needed and awaited rollout.

Is PPC the best type of advertising?

They promise if it doesn’t work you don’t have to pay

The modern form of mass advertising, as we currently know it, has been practised, obviously in newspapers initially, for over a hundred years now.

So it’s not exactly a new science or art although its delivery in the past two decades over the internet has in fact introduced a number of innovative new refinements to the basics.

What has never changed are two simple advertising propositions:

1. You usually have to spend money to make money 
2. To achieve a sale a prospect must first be made aware of what
you have to sell

Of course, the art of entrepreneurship, as embodied by the likes of Sir Richard Branson, often involves achieving point 2 while at the same time avoiding point 1!

However, it must be said, for the bulk of advertising exponents monetary constraints severely limit their ability to not only inform a market about a new product or service but, more importantly, to create the desire to purchase it in bulk.

Diehard exponents of the internet will no doubt claim this has all changed, pointing to the ability of a single website to become accessible world-wide for little cost; but the facts are, most practitioners working actively online these days are moving their focus from banner type website or portal based advertising to search, and the fastest growing segment is called performance advertising or PPC (Pay Per Click).

At this stage we should first look at SEO, i.e. Search Engine Optimizaton, which makes websites visible to search engines by inserting keywords strategically within websites so that they are identified when the web is crawled and they become indexed on the likes of Google. SEO enhances a website’s visibility on the natural / organic listings of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Given only about 8 per cent of all websites are optimised, and the proliferation of directories, many of the optimised websites still struggle to appear on the critical first page (top ten) of SERP listings when searched under their category as part of a global or even local search.

It is PPC performance advertising, most visible as Google AdWords - those text only adverts which appear predominantly in the right hand column of all search results - which hold the promise of the advertisers’ holy grail, viz. only pay if it works.

However, upon closer examination the reality appears far less than perfect. 

For many years it has been claimed by industry pundits in the US that ‘click fraud’ exceeds 30 per cent, which in itself is a massive indictment on the whole concept, but perhaps more worrying is the realisation that the so-called ‘performance’ relates to a searcher clicking on an advert, i.e. not actually making a purchase.  At this stage I would add there is apparently an emerging PPA (Pay Per Action) option which attempts to bridge this critical ‘conversion’ disconnect.

The bottom line is that the internet or PPC cannot deliver more than any other media channel notwithstanding all the hype, and in many instances it is no better than the other traditional ‘navigational form’ of advertising Yellow Pages print directories.

The point here is that you have to know what you want first, i.e. you are both aware of what you are seeking and you are actively wishing to purchase it!

In years gone by when I sold print advertising for Fairfax I would always tell would-be advertisers: “People do not read Yellow Pages directories for fun or looking for products/adverts – they are looking for phone numbers!”

In 2009 I say: “The internet is just one big directory of directories”, and I could add “PPC doesn’t even have big headlines or nice pictures to get you interested!”