AdWords is one of those marketing tools that sounds much better in theory than it behaves in practice, at least for many companies.
The initial selling points are compelling: Visibility on Google, the most powerful public research tool in human history; a pretty small learning curve; and immediate feedback on your campaigns’ performances.
But all too often, companies find their AdWords budgets spiraling upward in a hurry and very little to show for all the time and money invested.
If that scenario sounds familiar to you, it might be time to graduate to more sophisticated means of promotion.
Recognize the Limitations of AdWords
The natural starting point for any criticism of AdWords is the now-infamous study some researchers at UC-Berkeley conducted in conjunction with eBay that concluded PPC campaigns are mostly ineffective.
Those researchers determined, after running a number of campaigns that targeted presumed buyer intent and pointing users to eBay’s site, that PPC ads deliver negative returns most of the time, but companies nevertheless have a bias toward them because ROI is more easily measured — or at least estimated — in AdWords campaigns.
Neil Patel wrote a balanced pros/cons piece on paid search for Entrepreneur.com in September 2014, and he pointed out an inherent problem with bidding on keywords.
“[A]s eBay’s study pointed out, people who want these products are already aware of where they are going to purchase the product,” Patel wrote. “They are looking for information, because ‘advertising informs consumers of the characteristics, location and prices of products and services that they may otherwise be ignorant about.’ Thus, while display ads may have a marginal persuasive function upon product demand, searchers are more likely to seek out highly informational sources for their query.”
The problem, according to Patel, is that ads are promotional rather than informational, so the majority of searches for, say, “iphone 6 32gb” will try to click through to a site that offers reviews or pricing information, not a sell page. And many users who click-through to a sell page will just bounce.
Search Engine Land’s Ginny Marvin calls the study’s findings into question, though, because eBay bids on so many irrelevant keywords (“Bid on Cancer now” was one headline cited). “The problem with this reasoning is that this assumes ad copy and keyword strategy doesn’t play a role in paid search,” Marvin writes.
A smart PPC marketer, then, must understand user intent behind the keywords, align copy to those intentions, and understand how much each lead is worth.
“At a minimum, this means knowing what you’re willing to pay for a new customer, your lead-to-sale conversion rate and your visit-to-lead conversion rate,” Lexie Bond writes at Blue Corona.
“If you own a plumbing company and you’re willing to pay $200 per sale and your lead-to-sale conversion rate is 50 percent, you should be willing to pay $100 for a lead. If you then find out (through accurate tracking) that your website converts 10 percent of pay per click visits into leads, you’d know that you could afford to pay up to $10 per click.”
This sets up a discussion of PPC vs. SEO on a number of fronts: Is organic traffic ultimately cheaper to pull, and are those leads warmer?
Liz O’Neill Dennison at Kapost says it depends.
“PPC campaigns and SEO campaigns drive different kinds of traffic to your website,” she writes. “Which way you lean depends on what your traffic goals are. … Bottom line: In general, SEO promotes more valuable long-term relationships and trust with visitors, while PPC drives more traffic and immediate conversions.”
To recap: PPC ads can be useful if they match a user’s intent, cost less than the value of that lead, and actually get seen by humans.
We as an industry can do better. Let’s explore some of the ways we can do just that.
Paid Channel Alternative: Social PPC
Ads on social networks have the advantage of being much more targeted (because Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. already have a pretty robust profile of you as a customer).
“Facebook ads are simple, straightforward and effective for small businesses looking to create an advertising edge,” Adrienne Erin writes at SiteProNews. “Havahart, a wild animal control company with over 73,000 Facebook fans, uses paid ads to defeat Facebook’s engagement cap and remind their audience of animal lovers about their humane products.”
Facebook in particular is a fast-changing channel for advertising, as AdWeek’s David Cohen pointed out in December.
“The bad news for advertisers on Facebook: The cost of advertising on the social network rose dramatically in November 2014 compared with November 2013, with aggregate average cost per thousand impressions (CPMs) seven times higher,” Cohen writes. “The good news: Return on investment saw substantial gains, as well, according to the latest data from Kenshoo, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer.”
But Social Media Examiner CEO Nichole Kelly argues that Facebook has become too expensive for direct promotion. “Ultimately, our content strategy on Facebook shouldn’t be talking all about our self and sending self-promotional salesy messages,” she wrote back in April 2014.
“With the multiple challenges of broken attribution models, longer relationship building cycles and disconnected tracking systems it doesn’t seem feasible to track the real ROI. So we are facing a double whammy. We’d need to increase budgets significantly to reach our fans and we likely won’t be able to tie it to a direct ROI immediately.”
That said, her proposed solution (see the slide deck in the link) of incentivizing employees to be brand advocates within their personal networks seems equally fraught with big challenges.
Paid Channel Alternative: Native Advertising and Sponsored Content
Native ads and sponsored content are a couple of other solutions that allow marketers to rent someone else’s channel to promote a message.
Just to be clear, native ads can be any example of slotting a promotional message into an outlet where a reader would normally expect to find information content. This includes advertorials, promoted Tweets, and informational content that was sponsored by a company (and likely includes that company’s branding).
The problem with native ads is that the gap between expecting informational content and receiving promotional content leaves many prospects feeling deceived.
“Native ads may be popular with publishers, but consumers are not in love, according to a new survey conducted by Contently …” Erin Griffith writes in Fortune.
“Two-thirds of the survey’s respondents said they felt deceived when they realized an article or video was sponsored by a brand. Just over half said they didn’t trust branded content, regardless of what it was about. Fifty-nine percent said they believe that a news site that runs sponsored content loses credibility — although they also said they view branded content as slightly more trustworthy than Fox News.”
To sum up everything we’ve seen in online advertising, then, its limitations include visibility, believability and relevance. Research and optimization help tweak the ROI upward, but the fundamental problems advertising has faced since its inception still remain.
“Advertising has to be used to pay for news, and it has to improve for companies to be willing to buy it,” Robyn Tippins writes on her Mariposa Agency’s blog. “Display ads are useless and even PPC ads are only clicked 3% of the time. Advertising has to get better, but it doesn’t have to be misleading to be effective.
“Native ads are content marketing pieces that end up in a place where people expect news, so there has to be a barrier of some sort.”
But if marketers promoting native ads and sponsored content simply moved their messages from a rented channel to an owned channel, couldn’t that overcome the believability and relevance problems inherent in advertising?
We certainly think so. That’s the whole essence of content marketing.
And that third issue mentioned above, visibility, boils down to pure hustle when you own the channel on which you publish.
Own Your Own Channel: Content Marketing
Let us be transparent: Content marketing is hard work. It requires patience, persistence and a discipline that keeps you from mortgaging your long-term strategy in exchange for a quick win.
This is a tough road for advertisers accustomed to the “broadcast/quick sale model,” Ryan Johnson writes on the company blog for Chicago-based content agency Imagination.
“Social media and content marketing are intertwined, because both are about building relationships. While advertising is front-loaded, brands can use content to address the customer’s concerns at every stage of their purchase journey. While an ad can help inspire a purchase, content can keep the customer in touch with the brand before, during and after the purchase.”
Contrast Johnson’s description of an ad’s role, to “help inspire a purchase,” with what Joe Pulizzi wrote in November 2014 (emphasis ours): “The purpose of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior.”
That’s a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of a content marketer, but responsibility has always shared a proportional relationship with power.
And content marketing is certainly a powerful tool — much more so than blasting out PPC ads when someone casually Googles a keyword.
But if you just can’t live without your AdWords fix, no worries: We can show you how to drop a retargeting pixel in your content that will let you follow up on any prospects who might otherwise leak from a good content funnel.
images by:
Jason Ortego / Unsplash
Nicola Anderson / Unsplash
ellehem / Unsplash
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