Are ads still worth it in 2024 for your blog?

Ad spending can get painfully high even if optimized properly. While investments and expenses are inevitable for any business, it’s important to examine every spending, such as how much marketing budget should be used for ads.

Ads are also not a magic traffic generator. It simply puts your website on top of other search results. It’s your responsibility to make sure the search keywords are relevant, the title and description are intriguing, and most importantly, your blog or product is actually useful to users. Of course, if done correctly, ads are absolutely worth your money.

Don’t blindly run ads

After you’ve published your first post, it might be tempting to simply run ads and sit back and relax while your website gains traffic. More realistically though, you’ll relax while only losing money.

Before running ads, you should share your post or product on social media like reddit and linkedin and ask for feedback. Reach out to other relevant bloggers and sites to show your blog. If they like it (adding a backlink to your blog would be a big bonus), then it means your content is high-quality and useful, and ads can be a good way to get it to a wider audience.

It’s important to note that ads are not a savior for your business either. If for whatever reason your customers are leaving, you need to figure out why and solve that problem. Dumping more money on ads will likely just generate customers that’ll leave.

Target relevant searches

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Google has about 8.5 billion searches per day. That shows how much potential ads have on increasing traffic to your blog, but also how difficult it can be to comb through all the searches.

To validate your ads’ target keywords, do a quick Google search and examine what the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are. If your blog post is about “best tools to plant a tree”, but the SERPs are about “how to plant a tree”, then your content is irrelevant as the search intent is mismatched. If there are existing blogs that cover exactly your topic or niche, it might actually be a good thing as that proves there is demand out there.

Balancing competition, search volume, and cost-per-click

Everybody wants to find that untapped gold mine and profit over it without any competition. But in today’s saturated markets, if you find a niche without any competitors, pause and think about why that’s the case. You’re probably not that genius lucky winner; it’s simply that it isn’t a gold mine at all.

Similarly, if your ads are targeting keywords with 0 monthly search volume, you should stop because the data means nobody cares about that keyword.

On the other hand, targeting a high volume keyword means you’re competing against big, established players which is pointless unless you are very strong as well. It also means you’ll be spending a premium since high volume keywords have a high cost-per-click (CPC).

For most small businesses, you should focus on what’s called long-tailed keywords, which are simply keywords that are long and specific. Your post should then focus on answering that specific query by providing detailed information. The benefit of long-tailed keywords is that they have low competition and CPC with a good-enough search volume.

Write intriguing headlines

Let’s be honest: how often do you click on an ad instead of scrolling right past it? You probably ignore others’ ads, which means others ignore yours too.

However, the fact that your ad will be shown to users in some noticeable place, like the first result of a search, means users will read your headline whether they like it or not.

If your headline highlights the users’ problem and quickly shows your solution, chances are they’ll click through. In other words, if your headline resonates with your audience and suggests how your business can provide them value, they’ll be interested.

Ad platforms have a character limit on headings to help them be straight to the point. This restriction can be annoying, but users have short attention spans and will not read long headlines anyways. Writing a short, concise headline might be tricky in one step, so you can first draft some longer titles and then delete as much as possible. You might even consider using AI to help shorten a sentence. Beware that AI-generated headlines are often cliche, so don’t directly ask AI to write a headline; just ask them for help with rewriting or shortening a sentence.

If you followed the advice from the beginning of the article, you should have some social media posts to gauge user interest before thinking about running ads. This means you’ve already written some headlines. See which post did well, and adapt the ad headline from that.

Ads vs SEO

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Ads, even if done perfectly, only give you short-term boosts. To have a steady trickle of customers, you must invest into beating SEO, the long game. SEO benefits generally show up 3 to 6 months after the start of implementation. The real fruit is that those benefits will last a long time as well. When your business is showing up in listicles, articles, social media, or even as the first result of a high volume search query, you’ve gotten the hang of SEO. Ads will never give you this much return, and understanding SEO is critical to having a long-term successful business.

To be clear, SEO isn’t like stocks, where invested money can grow on autopilot. For SEO to show its benefits, you must consistently spend time or money into things like content creation and link building. Even after your website ranks #1 on a google search, you need to continue improving SEO to maintain that position. Ads, on the other hand, don’t require this much attention. Optimize them once, and you’re good to go.

You might have heard that more traffic benefits your SEO and rankings, and ads are a great way to get traffic. But no, ad traffic is not organic and does not influence your SEO. In general, it’s risky to try to outsmart the system, as your site can get penalized or deindexed. Google will catch up and patch any holes sooner or later, just like the March 2024 update, where spammy and low-quality content, oftentimes the case for AI-generated articles, are heavily penalized.

Conclusion

Ads are worth it in 2024 if you know that there is some demand for your business and optimized the ad correctly. Ads take work to set up and is not an easy traffic generator. Regardless, it’s important to not rely on ads because SEO is the long-term, cost-effective strategy.