Online marketers should remember to keep a careful balance between using technology to automate pay-per-click (PPC) ad management and looking after campaigns manually.

This is according to Julia Smith of the Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB's) Internet Advertising Sales Houses council, who explained that human management is the only way in which companies can successfully market their offerings through PPC by identifying unique selling points (USPs) and pushing the brand aspects of their products.

She noted that the "right" customer is often a web user who has seen a particular brand marketed elsewhere on the internet and looks for the company's website as a result.

"Online is the only truly monitorable medium but we now ignore the power of branding and quality," Ms Smith warned.

"It is therefore still essential that human influence is involved as they know the brand and can therefore market the true USPs of the site."

UK spending on PPC ads rose by 22.7 per cent to more than £1.9 billion last year, meaning that PPC now accounts for almost 60 per cent of all online spending, according to recent figures from the IAB.

Overall online advertising spending totalled £3.3 billion in 2008, up 17 per cent compared with the equivalent figure for 2007, the statistics showed.