Online advertising spending grew 7.5 percent in the U.S. in the first quarter, a clear sign that the digital media industry is recovering from a rough 2009, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

This seems contradictory to my post yesterday, but don’t be deceived. The reason ad spending is up is because it costs more to get a click because no one is clicking. I just launched a PPC campaign for a fellow solopreneur yesterday and to get on the first page of google in the search network we would have to pay $14 and that was even with a quality score of 7/10. I hope the companies paying $14/click have a good back end or they will loose their shirt!

It used to be you could put up a Pay Per Click (PPC) ad campaign with Yahoo, Google or Bing and get enough traffic to get some decent sales. But times have changed. People now know that the ads on the right of Google are paid ads so they no longer click on them. It is different depending on the market but I’m amazed at how many people need to see your ad before you can get some one to actually go to your ad. And of course, there in lies the secret: you must have a starving market.
But all of my testing in popular (just not crazy) markets people are holding on to their wallets and skipping ads. I suspect you’ll continue to see ad revenue drop from Google. PPC ads as they are right now are on their last leg. The billion dollar idea is the person that can come up with a new ad model that doesn’t irritate people.

When I want to launch a new affiliate offer using an existing email marketing list it takes me about an hour to do the following:

1. Login into affiliate network and find an offer.

2. Find the right creatives that I think will have the highest open rate and conversion rate

3. Set up pixel tracking in ptrack.org so I can track the offer and my open rate

4. Download the suppression file (these are people that have already received the offer and don’t wnat another one of the same thing.

5. Set up my email program, I use Group Mail because I can point directly to my backend SQL databases

Then send!

Lately, I am seeing between a 6-8% open rate depending on the SUBJECT which goes to show how important copywriting and headlines are to the entire conversion rate.