Throwing in the towel on PPC

I have seen a growing number of businesses drastically cutting or eliminating their search engine spending. This is mostly due to low conversion rates and the rising cost of keyword phrases...so marketers are looking into alternative ways to spend their advertising budgets.

This is ridiculous to me.

You cant blame anyone for a lack of conversion - this responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of the marketer. A poorly converting site will always be a poorly converting site.

I have heard the argument made about lead quality from Google going down as a retort. This is factually wrong since Google is spending all of its time making the results even more relevant. To single out Google or any search engine as becoming poor in lead quality is a cop out - the searchers habits didn't change overnight...it is more likely that the competition is heating up and why keyword phrases are getting more expensive.

Unfortunately alot of marketers have grown to view Google as a cash cow, and hold it to a different standard. The fact remains that Google provides a huge amount of traffic and for anyone to ignore it as a viable marketing channel is looking for the next cash cow instead of putting sound marketing practices into place.

What if you treated all marketing tactics that way? You would soon quit marketing all together.

The smart marketer will always be looking into ways to improve the channel. They will test combinations of ads, landing page layouts, keywords, messaging, offers, and audience segments. They will always be looking for ways to increase response while reducing the bottom line.

So if you find that you are contemplating getting out of search marketing - you might want to think twice about throwing in the towel. There are over a hundred million searches performed every day...do you want to give them all to your competition?