I’ve been worrying about spend on PPC for a long time now. Simply put, the amount of marketing budget that gets siphoned through to Google is, I believe, too much. Google in particular has an incredible machine for convincing customers to spend more money with them. But I’ve never seen a convincing study that shows the efficacy of that spend.
I don’t want to be too negative – there are ways in which this spend can be effective:
- Big launches, perhaps for a new product or service
- Maintenance of brand awareness
- Small companies who just want to catch people searching for a specific problem (“What does this error code on my boiler mean?”)
But what else? I’m not sure.
For this website I’ve been spending a small amount of money on PPC ads. More as an experiment – I wasn’t expecting to make millions from them. But my conclusion at the end of that experiment was that the return on the investment was pretty much zero.
So instead I’ve moved that budget pound for pound, over to a charitable donation – a UK based cancer support charity, https://www.maggies.org/get-involved/donate-maggies/. It’s my business, so this is something I can easily do. But here are some of the things you need to look at if you are considering the same:
- Donating to a charity from a company is different to donating individually. As I say, if it’s your company the decision is easy. But if you work for someone else it isn’t, and the larger the org the more difficult it will become. Convincing a board will be particularly difficult – they are asking you for growth and your response is to take that growth budget and give it to a charity instead. Not an easy argument to make unless the board is particularly enlightened.
- Tax issues – really this is all positive. There are ways of getting tax relief on charitable donations which your CFO will already know about. See here for a summary, though your accountant will know more.
- Get alignment across the management team for which charity or charities you’ll be working with, otherwise the arguments over different causes will take up time when you should be running your business.
- You don’t have to give 100% of that PPC budget to charity! If the budget was, for example, £1000, You could cut that budget to £900, take the spare £100 and give that to charity. And a really interesting thing here is you’ll see the impact of reducing that budget by 10%. Does it make any difference to traffic? Do you lead numbers drop?
At the absolutely very least, you will learn something about how to spend your marketing budgets more effectively. A lot of budgets get set up in the early days and then nobody looks at them for fear of doing some damage. But challenging the status quo is a good leadership skill and this could be a place where you start.
Oh and your employees will love you for it. That’s not why you do it, but if you can help charity you care about, why wouldn’t you?