How To Drive Traffic – Part 1: Is Google AdWords really dead?

Driving huge amounts of highly targeted traffic to a website is obviously one of the most important things to your online success. But to many marketers it’s also one of the most difficult tasks either. If you are online for quite a while you probably also receive emails claiming a new secret traffic strategy every day. Often times these emails claim that elder traffic sources are dead. But is that really true?

Three reasons why a strategy, system or concept is “dead”!

It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a strategy, a system or a concept to drive traffic, generate leads, to make more sales or achieve anything else that is important to successfully market our business online.

In my opinion there are three reasons why a strategy or system is claimed to be “dead”: 

1. The system or strategy didn’t work for that specific person who claims the dead of it.
2. The whole claim is part of a sales pitch in order to sell a “new” strategy or system.
3. The system, strategy or concept really doesn’t work any more. Which I would say is just the case in less than 5%. 

What about Google AdWords?

With the “Google-Slap” (where a lot of marketers got banned from Google AdWords) and the rise of Facebook PPC many people where claiming that Google AdWords doesn’t work anymore to promote your business.

Well, that’s not 100% correct.

Quality matters…

First off, I would say it is a question of what you do and how you are using Google AdWords.

If you want to promote an affiliate offer by just sending traffic to your affiliate link, that might also be quite difficult on Facebook these days

Whenever you create an ad on Google or Facebook it has to be approved by an employee before it will go live. If your ad doesn’t meet the advertising guidelines it will be declined. And of course all the advertising guidelines are written in a way that every ad can be declined. When your ad get’s disapproved you will also just receive a message that it got declined but they won’t tell you a specific reason.

Don’t get frustrated because of that. It’s just a part of the process.

Note: As long as your ad and your offer are meeting the quality guidelines of Google, Facebook or any other platform your ad will get approved.

Differences in targeting your audience… 

In order to discuss the differences between Google AdWords and Facebook PPC we need to talk about targeting and demographics. But it’s also very important to only compare Google Search PPC and Facebook PPC. If you don’t know yet, Google also provides a huge content network called the ‘Google Display Network’ (we will discuss that later on in this series). 

Today Facebook PPC has got two major advantages compared to Google Search PPC. 

1. You can specify a lot more different demographics to address your target audience more exactly.
2. Today Facebook PPC is still cheaper than Google AdWords PPC.

The importance of targeting

To get the most out of your online advertising it is absolutely crucial to reduce your spreading losses as good as possible. That means the more exactly you can target your audience with your ads the more people will click on them.

I don’t want to get into to much detail but since both advertising platforms are based on a bidding system (where you bid for the price of one click on an ad), the amount you pay per click will decrease the more people click on your ad.

Therefore Facebook got a first advantage over Google since it allows you to specify your target audience in much greater detail. Google basically only allows you to target specific keywords people are looking for on the search engine. 

Over and above that click prices on Facebook are still much cheaper than on Google Search PPC.

Another fact you need to consider when selecting an advertising platform is whether your target audience (you should already know your perfect customer as good as possible) is using this platform at all.

In my opinion Facebook is a great place for advertisers who are doing B2C business.

If you are in the B2B business, Facebook might not be the ideal place for you to advertise. 

Note: When your target audience consists of end users Facebook is a great way to promote your products and services. If you are targeting businesses you might want to consider another advertising platform.

This was the first post of this traffic-series. If you don’t want to miss the other parts of this series make sure to subscribe to my newsletter right below. I will let you know as soon as the next part is available.

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About Christian Weiss

After getting his degree in business administration and a very succesful corporate carreer, Christian started his own business in 2008. Since then he has brought more life & business to countless entrepreneurs & business owners worldwide.