In yesterday’s Media section of the Guardian, several Internet frontrunners attempted to peer into the crystal ball and tell us what they saw. A very interesting article indeed, with contributions from MySpace, YouTube, Google and other heavyweights.

But one section I found to be very interesting was by Maurice Levy, CEO of Publicis Groupe, who was predicting future trends in advertising. Levy, who is referred to in Wikipedia as a “French advertising magnate”, made some very cogent points about the future of interruption advertising.

Levy argues that, in an era where people are vocally against advertising that ‘interrupts’ their enjoyment of a programme, show, website or newspaper, advertisers will need to seek more creative means of reaching their target market. “This implies a brave new world of engagement and involvement between marketers and consumers”.

As far as online is concerned, I have to disagree. Ads on popular websites are rarely given the attention that their designers had hoped. Click-through rates are miniscule. And for every successful viral promotion or online game, there are countless others being decried as shameless publicity stunts.

More than ever, search engine marketing is the basis for online advertising. Being found when users search for your products and services is still by far the best way of raising your sales.

While Google is working to increase its hold on advertising outside of search, expect some innovation. But in terms of achieving measurable results from online, search is still the key and in that arena, simplicity rules supreme.

In a recently completed survey by Clientwell on 153 of Ireland’s top companies, we found that only 7% of them are using pay per click advertising on Google, MSN or Yahoo. This is a shocking statistic, given the adoption level in the US and UK.

In addition, only 47% of the companies surveyed have optimised their site for the search engines. Because of this, only one-third of these companies are achieving top 5 rankings on Google for keywords they should be targeting.

Given the almost universal acceptance of search engine marketing as the most effective means of driving sales and enquiries online, and the fact that publications as eminent as the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and The Economist, it’s surprising that Irish companies aren’t cottoning on to search engines so much.

Since pay per click passed the tipping point, many Irish companies these days are sitting up, taking notice and ploughing their advertising budgets into it.

And why not?? It’s a really cost-effective way of bringing targeted visitors to your website. And you don’t have to fiddle around with optimising your site to rank high on Google. No more messing with meta tags, page titles, link popularity, and suchlike. Just set up your campaign and site back.

This is an attitude that is all too prevalent, and there are a few reasons for it. For one, pay per click is a form of advertising, so it sits easier with agencies to sell it. And, as stated, pay per click is so much easier than search engine optimisation.

It’s great to have your name up there on the results page, but there is no substitute for high search engine rankings. The number one listing above will be seen by roughly 100% of people searching. The ad on the right-hand side, on the other hand, will be seen by about 50% of people.

The Eyetools diagram above is taken from a piece of software that tracks users eye movements on a Google results page. Red areas correspond to parts of the page that are viewed by almost everyone. Orange and yellow areas are popular parts of the page, and the blue areas are viewed less by users.

Findings such as this are forcing many companies back to the realisation that organic SEO is at least as important as pay per click. Even though it’s more difficult to get right, it needs to be an integral part of the marketing strategy.

Just in case you didn’t already know, we manage the Google AdWords campaigns for a lot of clients. These campaigns get a much higher click-through rate than banner advertising. Banners are much-vaunted for their branding abilities, and while research on that is mixed, that’s not the issue here. We’re looking at click-through rates from Google campaigns. And I just want to tell you a few of the figures that we’re seeing from our work with clients.Click-through rate [definition] is basically the percentage of people who saw your ad that actually clicked on it to visit your site. Banner advertising click-through rates have settled at 0.2% or thereabouts - this equates to roughly two people clicking on your ad for every thousand that see the ad.

To calculate a click-through rate, you divide the number of clicks by the number of ‘views’ (also called ‘impressions’) of the ad. Views/Impressions is the number of times an ad is viewed by internet users.

So, if your ad is seen 100 times and 2 people click on it, that’s a click-through rate of 2%. If 8 people clicked out of 100, it’s 8%. If 1,000 people viewed the ad and 22 people clicked on it, that’s a click-through rate of 2.2%.

Now, onto blowing our trumpet. Only joking. These are actual figures from client campaigns. Let’s go:

- 18.3% for a popular mis-spelling of a client’s brand name. 173,000 views, 32,000 clicks.

- Exactly 17% for a targeted keyword. 600,000 views of the ad, over 100,000 clicks. Irish users only.
- 15.4% for the keyphrase “mortgages ireland”.
- 14.8% for an extremely popular autos search term. Irish only.
- 12.4% for a business-to-business technology operation offering a free white paper for download as a sales leads gatherer.
- 9.9% over three years for an extremely popular hotel term, targeted to US and UK users.

Checking actual conversion rates [define] on each of these terms shows an average of 4.1%, from a low of 2.9% to a high of 11.2%.

This is hard proof that online is working for a wide variety of industries. In terms of actual business, each of these clients is adding to their bottom line by investing in online marketing.