I’ve been in the opinion that if we are heading for a recession then working within the online World is going to insulate us or even might improve business. The reason I’ve thought this is doing business online is generally accepted as cheaper than traditional methods. Also the ability to track success and therefore calculate the return on investment is so easy online. This covers all sorts of areas such as advertising, eCommerce or marketing in general. As businesses will need to justify their expenditure more during hard times it seems online is the sensible option.

However details that Google’s results weren’t as high as expected got me a little more thoughtful about if my original opinion was correct.

The worrying figure initially for me was “The number of paid clicks on websites operated by Google and its partners fell 1% from the first quarter”. Not quite what I was expecting. However I then thought this through further.

The number of paid clicks is what the actual customers are clicking. You’d expect with the possibility of a recession people won’t be shopping as much so the number of clicks would drop. This would also tally with the idea that PPC is going to become increasing competitive as businesses fight for these precious clicks.

At this time we haven’t had client’s reporting any noticeable difference in cost for clicks but I think it’s coming.

As always it’s going to interesting to see how things pan out.

After all the predictions of a 10% drop in profits for Google for Q1 of 2008 they blew everyone out of the water with a 30% increase in profits over 2007.

With all the worries of an impending recession this is perhaps encouraging for online businesses. I’m one of the people that actually thinks a recession may be good for Internet service companies (or at least should be seen as an opportunity).

During a recession every penny will be tight for companies and therefore people have to prove success of various campaigns. Online campaigns can be tracked easily so a ROI can be calculated and relatively speaking online advertising and communication is cheap in comparison to traditional methods.

So if we do have to start watching the pennies very closely I think a hard working website and online strategy is going to more important for a business than ever.