I’m shocked by the number of webmasters and website owners affected in the last 6 months by google’s aggressive approach to adwords advertisers who fall foul of their strict guidelines. They are ejected! Banned from using google adwords. That’s a draconian response and for some people it means their business sinks into oblivion if most of their traffic and customers come from google adwords campaigns.
Cory Bornmann from affportal was a recent example and I’ve read angry posts on forums from webmasters who now have little or no income, now facing a bleak future. Google is the gorilla of the PPC marketplace, so they can do this. And they argue that they’re weeding out advertisers who do not display a high degree of relevance in their keywords, adverts and landing pages. It seems to be survival of the fittest.
I think the biggest lesson from all these horror stories is diversification. You need to diversify your traffic sources. To rely upon google for the continuation of your business is not wise. They don’t really care about you. Their mantra is relevence. They want results that provide exactly what the searcher wants. If you can’t provide it, they don’t want you. In today’s video Hal Varian provides advice on how to use google adwords to get the best results. The message is simple to understand even if it’s not quite so easy to put into practice.
But google isn’t the only PPC provider. Yahoo and MSN are both smaller, but worthy competitors. And it’s worth advertising with both. There are dozens of ways to diversify your traffic sources and marketing. There is organic search engine ranking. Not easy to achieve but worth the long haul. Paid advertising opportunities have exploded in the last few years. Social marketing is huge, especially when so many internet eyeballs are on social networking sites. And article marketing is a very effective way of getting traffic and branding your business.
A ban from google shouldn’t bring your business down.
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Wow, that sucks. I’ve heard of people getting banned from Adsense, but not from Adwords. It doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t Google make a whole lot of money off their advertisers?