Google myopia

As a marketer trying to drive traffic to an ebusiness website at ChannelWave I immediately responded with glee when Google offered a simple web interface to enter targetted advertising copy using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising but it is beginning to get very difficult to maintain the simple strategy of getting the ads into Google to reach traffic.

It used to be that Google and the search engines had a corner on the PPC market. If we wanted to advertise in a magazine a spiffy magazine advertising sales person would call and tell us how our $5,000 monthly advertising commitment would allow us to combine print and online media to reach our target audience and that we would likely see results in three months....

Well anyways the reality was that the folks who ran magazines were fighting pay per click tooth and nail for a long time because it was a tough potential business proposition. Pay per click doesn't have the loop holes that a pay per impression system had. The magazine could say in a pay per impression that the ads were simply not well targetted or that the users weren't interested in the product. But as an advertiser I never cared about people who aren't interested in my product. That isn't how it works any more.

So I am returning to the advertisers themselves. The keywords cost a little more at $.50-$1.00 minimums for paid clicks. But the benefit is that I can control the traffic both by the segment of users the magazine targets as well as the subject matter within the magazine that the content is reaching. For example. I can fight for the Google clicks for the word CRM because we sell a component of CRM for managing channel relationships and commerce or I can go to CRM magazine and select the channels area of the magazine. Or at least I hope I can. It is good to see the publishers getting smart and not giving-in to the awesome power of the search engine keyword advertising. The company we are testing with is called Industry Brains. They aggregate for a large number of content providers. I'm not saying Google is dead in the water, but I do think advertisers selling products that really need to target an audience should be looking at alternative PPC providers.