I have a customer who has a free MYOB website. And he pays $400 + GST per month for Google adwords campaign with Adcerate who are a NZ based company.

We have never signed any contracts with them and we just pay each month. My customer gets a 4 page report each month which shows we get between 38-48 clicks to the website each month. The report also includes CTR, how many impressions, keywords including keyword performance and impressions, adword position and performance. We can also see what devices are clicking and the region.

Each month we get a phone call from the account manager giving us an overview as well.

The only other web presence is linkedin, facebook, and twitter accounts which actually stay inactive most of the time, apart from the occasional website update. But the customer is happy with the performance.

What I did was to set up a basic spreadsheet with three columns - one for internet (including adwords, linkedin etc), one for referals and one for publications. Each time someone actually takes the next step and makes contact with us via an email or phone call because they found us through one of the three advertising mediums we literally just add a number 1 into the appropriate column. We can see at a glance how internet based advertising compares with the other advertising avenues. The customer can then direct their marketing budgets accordingly.

I look at internet marketing like a CV, the point of it is to get that initial contact from a potential customer. For our particular situation it doesn’t matter which internet platform gets the most hits, as long as we are contacted. My customer is happy with the results and we have used this method for about 3 years. He doesn’t care how many followers he has. Its looked at over the potential earnings that just one customer contact could generate.

To know if it’s a scam I think would be to compare how many clicks to the website we are getting against how many impressions and to compare those to other reports in the same industry sector.

The internet marketing industry is unregulated so there aren’t any nationally available statics or benchmarks that can be relied on with any certainty.

At the moment we don’t see any need to change. No one else has been able to offer any better stats or guarantees as to performance results