The first annual E-tailer PPC Stress Study has revealed that over 44% of surveyed marketers spend 20% or more of their online advertising budgets on PPC, but still struggle with resourcing and measurement of their pay-per-click campaigns.

The study, carried out by the e-tailing group, inc. and NetElixir, Inc., provides a valuable insight into the state of pay-per-click campaign management:

• 100% of e-commerce executives use Google Adwords, 90% use Yahoo! Search Marketing, 76% use Micorsoft AdCenter and 27% use Ask Sponsored Listings.
• 40% of advertisers manage more than 5000 keywords.
• 59% of respondents manage their campaigns internally, 18% outsource pay-per-click management and 23% use a mix of internal and external PPC campaign management.
• Cost (71%), ease of execution (63%), control (25%) and prior negative outsourcing experiences (33%) are cited as the main reasons for managing PPC campaigns in-house.
• Time spent on managing pay-per-click campaigns ranges from less than 5 hours per week for 32% of respondents to over 21 hours per week for 33% of respondents.
• Almost all respondents (99%) have 3 or less people working on their PPC campaigns.
• 80% of managers use ROI as the benchmark for measuring the success of their PPC campaigns.
• 47% of e-commerce executives say that their average cost-per-click is less than $0.50.

The bottom line? Pay-per-click advertising has well and truly become an integral part of online advertising, but those involved in the day to day management of pay-per-click campaigns are still struggling with the execution. With more and more smaller companies starting to use pay-per-click advertising, the need for simple PPC solutions should continue to grow.