Comments on: Why Blogging is 1,000 Times Better than Google Adwords

By: Kenny Jahng

Kenny Jahng — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 02:40:41 +0000

John, I’m chiming in to give a bit of balance to your edict against Google Adwords PPC campaigns for churches. From my experience in running somewhat larger Adwords accounts (30,000 keyword campaigns) since I first started over 9 years ago, I can say that pay per click is still effective if used properly.

While I wouldn’t support a strategy that ignored all other online church marketing tactics, including blogging, I wouldn’t be so quick to strike pay per click off the list of available options. Because local search is usually skewed toward long tail keyword permutations, your bids will be relatively low across the majority of your keyword inventory that you are bidding on.

For one church PPC account, I’ve had click throughs charged as low as $0.06. But even if you’re paying on average $0.10-$0.12 per click, that means a $100/month budget would net you anywhere from 800-1000 click throughs per month. If you get 900 visitors/month, and only 1% of those people actually visit your church, that’s over 100 new people (or families) over a year to your ministry. Again if only 1 of those families actually become regular attenders or members, and they give anywhere between the reported average ranging from $1,411 to $2000 per year, you’re already ahead of the game. And any additional families that join the community makes this a clear positive ROI situation.

And as a post script, of course, all of this doesn’t even include the value of getting over 100 actual families to walk through the door and have the opportunity to expose them to the gospel in action in person as they engage with your welcoming newcomers ministry — as well as the seeds of regeneration sown by the Word preached and heard in those 100+ visits.

Again, effectiveness of search advertising really is impacted by the curation of the keyword bidding lists and custom landing pages you really should build to get the site visitors to commit to visiting the church in person next Sunday or for a church event.

Thanks for sharing your insights based on your own experiences. You’ve also giving me food for thought – perhaps worthy of a mini-series of posts on my site in the near future.

Kenny

By: Marilee Hysquierdo

Marilee Hysquierdo — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:27:15 +0000

Adwords is really good in driving traffic to your website. however, they are very strict right now and they would not easily approve websites that they thought have low quality content. |’

By: » Why AdWords IS Worthwhile for Churches

» Why AdWords IS Worthwhile for Churches — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:07:25 +0000

[...] Springs used Google AdWords to draw new visitors to their church. ChurchCrunch responded with an article claiming Google AdWords is not worth it. However, there quite a few points in that article that I [...]

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:46:02 +0000

I actually read every single word of this post. Good advice.

By: Rodlie

Rodlie — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:32:30 +0000

This is very intriguing. You really have me thinking. I suppose this is assuming that this is a church blog? Can you give an example of this, of a case where a church has benefited better from the blog vs. adwords?

By: Christian Web Trends

Christian Web Trends — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:33:45 +0000

But if Christian blogs suck, then what makes you think this church could do it well enough to get any traffic or search rankings? I appreciate the pushback. I disagree on several points and hope to have time to write about them later today. - Paul

By: Adam_S

Adam_S — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:10:09 +0000

I have an after school program that is a client of mine. I have been encouraging them for two years to blog to get more people on their site and to build more interaction among their donors and volunteers. They just won't do it. It is not an age thing. I am older than every person on staff except the executive director. No one wants to take responsibility. Fundraising people want it to be programing people because that is where the stories will come from. Programming people don't want something else on their plate and think that fundraising or volunteer people should take it. Volunteer people aren't sure how it would help them. So I suggested they buy adwords because at least they would get on the top 10 of google and their board and donors were not happy that they were not on the top 10. So now they are and the board and donors are happy, but I am not sure that it is doing much more than that.

By: Chris Sullivan

Chris Sullivan — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:00:57 +0000

Good stuff. I've fooled around some with adsense and adwords for a site I help out with and the experience was pretty miserable and unrewarding. Blogging is definitely a good option but like you said, it requires you to be keyword and topic focused and depending on what you are marketing that can be more or less difficult. On another note, excited to have entered the top 30 commenters.

By: seeing both sides

seeing both sides — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:56:02 +0000

I think you should clarify — it's not that all PPC programs are bad or unprofitable, it's just that Churches need to know how to use them. Specifically low cost keywords that are geo-targeted to a specific area can be very effective. As usual, the "one size fits all" solution is rarely the best solution. Your post could use some more nuance, a little less hubris.

By: kevincooper

kevincooper — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:43:23 +0000

Worth the long post! Thanks for setting churches and business leaders straight on this. Tried using both Adwords and AdSense and its true, people are as you say, 'banner blindness'. To me, good organic search marketing is the way to go.