Recession Ad Spending
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Well, today is the Chicago marathon…the city is flooded with runners and their families. People are walking around with their marathon jerseys and finisher medals. You couldn’t ask for a nicer day for it, especially for a Chicago October day!
I jog between three and four miles every day – and have for years – but I have no freakin’ idea how those people run 26.2 miles!
Today I want to talk about the current state of our economy (here in America) and how it might affect advertising spending, and how that might affect your adsense empire.
No one likes to talk economics, but…
Most people don’t really think about the advertisers when they think about adsense. But they’re a key part of the equation. Whenever you decide to build a website on a certain topic, the first thing you should do is make sure there are a lot of advertisers paying decent money for keywords related to that topic.
Personally I use the free spyfu.com to check advertiser data…it will show you how many advertisers are currently bidding on specific keywords, how many have bid in the past, and a range of what price they are currently paying per click. I generally look for keywords that have 15-20 advertisers bidding at least $1 per click (or somewhere around that range). 13 advertisers paying .80 cents? I might go for it…you get the idea.
Most people will do that much research and stop there…and that’s what I want to warn you against. You should also keep up on current business news about the economy. Because when times get bad (like they are now) advertisers might pull back on ad spending….and that will directly affect your earnings.
Yesterday as I was sitting in Starbucks drinking my daily venti coffee and reading the Financial Times newspaper on my kindle, I came across an article titled “Advertising groups braced for cutbacks – Agencies concerned over US economy”.
How quick do you think that caught my eye!?
It basically said that advertising agencies expect a decrease in ad spending because major corporations feel that the U.S. is on the verge of dipping into another recession.
It also said that companies have plenty of money to spend on advertising, but are nervous about spending it because of all the nasty rhetoric coming out of Washington lately. The President keeps running around the country screaming that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes (hence, MORE taxes in his opinion) and so the rich are pulling back on their advertising spending out of fear.
I don’t want to turn this blog post into a political argument, though it should be no surprise to you that I’m a rampant capitalist who believes in free markets and dislikes almost anything that comes out of any politicians mouth, especially democrats.
What I DO want to point out is that it’s always a good idea for you to keep abreast of economic news of this nature because it will affect your earnings, almost directly. Knowing before hand that companies are likely to pull back on advertising spending in the next year can give you a leg up and allow you the time to make alternative plans to weather that storm.
But in the mean time…keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
