February 19, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, Featured by MatthewDC

google-adwords-logo

Google Adwords has been the de facto advertising platform for the majority of Internet Marketers since Day 1. It offers the best user interface, the most overall exposure, but has a few serious shortcomings that might cause an opening to exist for a few key competitors.

For starters, Google Adwords has become seriously expensive. Even with the perfect website, some keywords just have way too much competition. Due to the bidding structure of their campaigns, it can be very hard for smaller businesses to get their foot in the door. This would not be an issue if Google were not the #1 source of traffic on the Internet and for many keywords, it is near impossible to receive first page rankings for organic search.

The second major issue with Adwords is more with Google itself. Every single Internet Marketer is terrified of the Google Slap. For those of you that don’t know, the price you pay per click using adwords is partly determined by what Google calls a Quality Score. This Quality Score is a rating, determined by Google, based on key factors of your landing page. No one knows the exact formula that is used to determine Quality Score, but it is assumed that it has a lot to do with the content of the landing page, keyword ratios, as well as heading tags and link anchor text.

The Quality Score system sounds like it would work, but Google arbitrarily reviews the sites currently running campaigns and then lowers the score at will. Having your score lowered from a 7 /10 down to a 3/10 can raise your cost per click $0.50 all the way up to $10.00 depending on the niche. For most Internet Marketers, this obviously makes Adwords a no go. So the real question becomes, are there any other viable options?

Luckily, the answer is yes, and they are gaining traction on Google every single day. The largest of which is quite a powerful organization and brand on it’s own. The company I am talking about is Facebook. Facebook has taken it upon themselves to introduce there on PPC system. Their system allows you to reach their 400+ million current members. This is a HUGE market to reach and can bring quality traffic for almost any niche. The best part? The traffic is still relatively cheap. Facebook has yet to become overly inflated by inexperienced marketers or Quality Scores and therefore can bring you a solid stream of traffic at a reasonable price. Right now, I would say that facebook is becoming the system of choice for most PPC marketers.

The second major PPC network that is gaining considerable notice is AdBrite. While they have been around the block for a while, many still don’t know they even exist. AdBrite works just like Adwords. Site owners can install their ad code on their blog or site and allow advertisers to post text or banner ads with relevant products. It has a decent amount of traffic, from respectable sites, and is VERY cheap compared to Adwords. I personally use Adbrite on several of my sites as an alternate source of income (to diversify my adsense portfolio).

I don’t ever recommend that any Internet Marketer put all of their eggs in one basket. Especially not a basket as expensive and overused as Google Adwords. Facebook and AdBrite of quality alternatives for those of you that would like to increase their traffic, or diversify their site monetization techniques. All in all, it can never heart to research other options. Adwords is losing it’s strangle hold on the advertising community and that can never be a bad thing.

Do you know any other popular and reputable PPC engines? Post them below in the comments!

Would you like to find out more about Adbrite?