Quite often I will receive inquiries from new clients after they have exhausted a rather large budget on a Google Adsense campaign, which failed to bring the desired results. While their pay-per-click budget was successful in generating an influx of traffic and brought in the desired number of targeted visitors, it failed to convert these visitors into paying customers as expected. As with any PPC campaign, once that budget is gone, the flow of traffic stops.
Courtney Rubin at Inc magazine recently published an article where she cited a User Centric study that showed a large percentage of users ignore paid and sponsored spots on Google while everyone took the time to review the organic search listings. 100% of those involved in the study spent time reviewing and visiting the regular site listings, only 26% paid attention to the Google Adsense spots. Is there better ways to spend your search engine marketing budget then an expensive pay-par-click campaign that 76% of potential customers are going to ignore anyways?
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While PPC advertising is a good way to grab that influx of traffic you’re looking for when launching new products or services, it can be rather expensive and should definitely be supplemented with a program to build organic traffic to your website. Increasing your search engine placement on some of your integral keyword terms and exploring relevant microniche and longtail search terms can end up giving you a steady stream of targeted traffic. While the results of pay-per-click advertising are temporary, creating organic traffic through various methods can provide you with a valuable source of long term visitors.
Securing relevant backlinks, article marketing, developing a network of feeder sites and using free resources such as Squidoo and Hubpages are all ways that you can both improve your SERP results as well as securing organic traffic.
If you’re considering spending your entire online marketing budget on a Google Adsense campaign, you may want to reconsider and spend a portion of it on securing a long-term stream of targeted traffic. While Google’s pay-per-click program can deliver a high volume of visitors in a short time period, your company may benefit much more by spending that money on the “slow and steady” approach.