With the economy slipping and advertising revenues off for almost all advertising portals and distributors, now could be the best time to look at PPC and PPM for a better ROI. Depending on your business model and your previous experiences with PPC and PPM, it may make sense to take another look at the possibilities. If the numbers and the ROI just didn’t make sense before, PPC and PPM pricing might have come down enough to allow for more profitable margins. PPC offers a great opportunity for immediate targeted traffic and if formatted correctly with landing pages and precise audience targeting, can result in a much higher conversion rate when compared to other advertising mediums. Have we seen prices drop enough over the last few months of this deepening marketing recession to make it worthwhile to your business?

There are a few things you must ask yourself before jumping into a potentially expensive PPC or PPM advertising campaign.

• Have an in-depth tracking system for sources of web traffic, and the resulting conversion ration coming from that source. Conversion tracking code is a must and is the only way to validate the effectiveness of paid marketing campaign.

• In order to validate the effectiveness of a particular campaign, you must know exactly what a conversion is worth to you in terms of $$’s. If you can properly identify this number, you can easily weigh the value of a conversion against the price you pay for it.

• If your product is relatively new and your objective is to create brand awareness, PPC can also be a relatively affective medium. Affiliate PPC advertising on complementary websites and partners usually prove most effective for this as you can create visual and image advertising mediums.

• If your product is potentially virally spread or will catch on quickly, utilizing PPC and PPM campaigns within networks and social websites can prove very effective. By piggybacking on users with existing relationships it is possible to make less money go much further than in direct PPC campaigns on horizontal search engines.

Once you evaluate these aspects of both the advertising medium and your product, you must look at the overall online advertising market as a whole to see where the opportunities lie.  There are many opportunities to choose from, Yahoo , Google, MSN, Facebook, StumbleUpon, or Digg. All of these advertising mediums offer large platforms to drive as much traffic as you can afford, and these are just a few. Often times it can prove more effective to approach smaller and more specialized websites for more targeted campaigning. By establishing these smaller relationships, it can be more time consuming but they can yield a higher ROI if implemented properly. Both methods, if monitored correctly, can provide a great way to increase returns during a time when advertising costs are dropping because of a dampened global economy.