I read a recent article in Christianity Today and a referring blog post here (and their apparent “sister” site…?) about that shared how one congregation experienced a “large increase of traffic” because of their use of Google Adwords.
Let me just put it down that any advertising, regardless of channel, will give you more traffic. That’s a given. The question is whether it’s worth it.
The answer is a definite no, from my perspective.
The article says that the congregation experienced a 25% increase in 2 years. Although that’s better than absolutely nothing, that’s just simply not good enough to warrant spending any greenbacks for traffic, especially considering the many more effective alternatives.
And, I’m not sure where they are getting their traffic patterns and metrics from either, because it’s not showing me the numbers. The most accurate depiction is about ~200 visits per month, which is in line with their supposed 4 visits / day average, which was for the Oct/Nov/Dec report:
In addition, one of their most highly traffic’d keyword is an apparent misspelling of their name. That’s not a good thing either.
So, what to do? Let’s start at the beginning…
The Google Adwords program has been around for a long, long, long time. I’ve been using it since it first came out to advertise some sites and projects that I had started to generate some traffic.
And for a while, it was good.
But things changed, consumers were increasingly becoming less interested in the advertisments, “banner blindness” became the understood reaction (or un-reaction) to ads, and the click-throughs dropped down to extremely sad levels while the cost to buy space on sites and Google.com went through the roof.
The return on investment was paltry, and I was definitely not earning back what I was spending, not by a long shot. I was digging myself a very, very, very large hole in my pocket.
So, I stopped. The last time I used any form of Google Adwords was June 29, 2008, as you can see in the screenshot. I’ll probably never use it again.
What I did decide to do was just blog about the projects. It was far cheaper (free!) and the return was 1,000 times greater, and I’m still reaping the returns of those blog posts.
You see, a blog (especially a WordPress one) can get indexed more effectively than almost any other form of “media” related website. They are simply built to be search, crawled, indexed, and reviewed.
Also, although your campaign may show a happy return the moment you start paying the return long-term is completely missing from an ad campaign. The moment you stop paying is the moment your equity begins to die. In the case of a blog, this just doesn’t happen.
You see, your blog is your legacy. The posts are your “marketing” and “advertising” and your archive is that persistent equity build that’ll last you as long as you never delete the post.
That’s a good ROI (Return on Investment).
Also, with a blog, your ability to capture keywords and begin “owning the space” is much more easy and infinitely cheaper. You can target as many keywords for return as you like, as long as you blog about them and specifically target them in your content, titles, tags, and categories.
Although the article contends that the church never really uses up their $50 budget a month, it’s not a surprise, just look at their traffic patterns and “increase” and it makes complete sense.
In addition, PPC marketing, even for Churches and Ministries, is just as bad and competitive as the secular marketplace. I really have no idea why the article would suggest otherwise.
I would know, I do that too (and still do):
You see, I’ve been on both sides of the fence here, offering space to sell Google ads (Google Adsense) as well as trying to buy them.
As the screenshot shows, this one site that I currently manage received 164,084 page impressions through one ad that I have on every single page. This is a monsterous traffic stream from a pageview perspective, but look at how much it really brought in terms of conversion:
.0008045
Pretty ridiculous, if you ask me, not to mention how awesome it was to see how much I got yesterday from it (one awesome penny…).
What’s so sad about all of this is since I’m extremely educated in the cost per click in terms of the core keywords that this particular site screams and have done the research, I know that some of these cost the producers of content upwords of $5.00 per click…
It’s highway freaking robbery. And YES, I’m guilty as charged.
At times I do feel bad about it when I think on it too long.
But they are apparently willing to pay for it, and I need to pay for diapers somehow. But let’s be certain about one thing: It’s a crumbling relationship at best, one that definitely won’t last forever. Wasted real-estate on my site, for all intense and purposes.
Finally, the only thing that I can partly agree with in the article is the final comment at the very end:
“Google will only link people to your website. If your church doesn’t have a good website, then it probably isn’t worth it.”
The first part is wrong: Google will index your site, even if it sucks. Just survey the current results for “church” in your local area and you’ll re-familiarize yourself with the state of Church Websites Online…
But, if you do in fact use PPC marketing as a strategy, you might as well link to dynamic and consistently updating content that won’t be stale and that actually does look like it was made in the year 2000+.
All in all…
Blog. Don’t PPC.
It’s better long term, won’t hurt your bottom dollar, will increase your online equity much more effectively, and is more in line with the declining socio-culture of what we do on the interwebs anyway.
David says
You are on fire today! I agree with you. For churches, blogging is a much better strategy than buying ad words. If a church isn't into blogging consistently, posting short press-releases about upcoming community events will give a good current stream of information for Google to index as well. In the end the two keys to web success for a church are:
1) Have a professional web site – represent yourself with excellence
2) Keep your content current – no one is interested in what you did last year
Those two things will reap better ROI than Adwords!
kevincooper says
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.
seeing both sides says
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.
Chris Sullivan says
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.
Adam_S says
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.
Christian Web Trends says
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
Rodlie says
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?
Jim says
I actually read every single word of this post. Good advice.
Marilee Hysquierdo says
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. |’
Kenny Jahng says
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