A lot of clients want to use paid per click (PPC) advertising like Google ads.

And I don’t know if you have tried to talk people out of ideas…but it’s a lot harder than talking them into stuff!

I usually try to talk people out of paid ads as a main strategy for reasons I will go into below. Yes, I do have a vested interest if they spend more money with me and less with Google but as a bigger picture point of view, I hate seeing people waste money.

google-adwordsHere’s the analogy I use for paid ads.

Let’s say that I put out there: “Hey everyone, I’ll pay you $1 to walk into my office.”

Would more people walk into my office? Yes.
Would they buy stuff from me? Maybe. Maybe not.
Would they stop coming after I stopped paying $1? Yes… or at the very least it would slow way down. 

For me, PPC ads are a quick fix: a way to get some initial traffic to a new site, run a promotion, or other short term specific scheme. But they are never a big mix in any advertising budget I want to work with.

Now let’s say someone caught up to your scheme and suddenly they say “Hey everyone, I’ll pay you $2 to walk into my office.”

Would people walk into their office more than yours? Yes.



If you’ve ever bought Google Ads, you’ll notice upping your bid makes your ads show up more often. So suddenly, Google has us all in bidding wars with each other and Google makes 100 million dollars a day on this. (Check out Ross’ article about this topic which was part of my inspiration today!)

You are smarter than this, people! Stop spending a lot of money on something that doesn’t work in a long lasting way.

So here’s what Google Ads mean to me:

1) They aren’t more than 10% of any ad budget.
2) They are for set, temporary, specific campaigns.
3) They are ads, they aren’t marketing.

To me, marketing is building a relationship. It’s posting regularly to a group of people who follow your company on Facebook or writing to an email list of people who have all opted in. With both ads and marketing, there are some costs involved but with marketing, there is an intention there to create a relationship, not just have a transaction.

Ads are part of a marketing budget, but never the whole thing. Just like you wouldn’t dump all your money in one stock, diversify your marketing too.

Because paying people $1 to walk in is something you can do for so long. Making people want to walk in is a better use of your time…and budget.

 

 

 

 

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