Are we moving into a post Adwords world?

23 July 2012 by Charles Howden

If you’ve been using Adwords for the past five years, you will have noticed an increase in the cost of running your campaigns, and more significantly, you may have experienced a reduction in the number of leads that your spend has created.

It almost feels blasphemous to suggest that Google Adwords may have lost their shine as a prospect generating mechanism, but consider this:

  • Many more businesses are using Adwords creating competition for search terms resulting in a higher cost for showing ad listings.
  • The increase of quality content online, coupled with the advance of SEO, keeps information gathering surfers in the content listings pages (which they prefer). As a result of this you will have to show your ad more often to attract a click. Click through rates are down.

What does this mean? Well you can take your on-line spend and put it into Facebook, you can invest in social marketing and the creation of on-line networks. At this point in time, fairly early days of proving capability.

And for many businesses, this may mean returning to traditional lead generating routes. Dare we say prospecting by telephone, generating referrals, desk based research (using Google, of course).

I’d love to be wrong on this. What’s your experience? Are you still getting as much value from Adwords as you were?

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