The truth about Google Ads: Expensive, time-consuming and low conversions

Google Ads is often sold as a magic solution to get to the top of the search field. The reality for most small and medium-sized businesses is quite different:

• High cost per click: Competition has pushed prices up. It is not uncommon to pay around 10 kroner just for someone to click log into your website.

• Low conversion rate: Experience shows that these expensive clicks rarely lead to actual sales or inquiries. The money quickly disappears out the window.

• Difficult to hit the target: Setting up campaigns that actually reach the right target audience is enormously time-consuming and technically demanding.

• Bad and salesy customer service: If you have a problem and contact Google's customer support via form, it often takes a long time to get a response. When they do respond, they often seem more interested in selling you new features and increasing your budget than actually solving your problem.

Our advice to you must using Google Ads: Don't blindly trust Google's algorithms. My impression is that the platform is more concerned with maximizing its own earnings than ensuring the best interests of the customer. I recently spoke to an industry colleague who said that he deliberately does this opposite of what the automatic suggestions in Google Ads recommend. If you are going to advertise here, we strongly recommend using manual bidding so that you retain control of your own money.

Facebook Ads: Tireless customer service and the wrong target audience

Social media is another popular channel for digital advertising, but our experiences with Meta (Facebook and Instagram) are far from positive:

• You end up paying for the wrong audience: If you’re not extremely careful about setting strict age, demographic, and geographic limits, Facebook’s algorithms will often show your ads primarily to seniors, which may result in lots of «likes» but rarely paying customers for your business.

• Frustrating customer support: Facebook Ads customer service is perceived as very poor. Support is usually based abroad, and chatting with them is extremely time-consuming. They tend to ask an endless series of standardized questions that rarely lead to an actual solution to your problem.

Why SEO is the smart investment

When you pay for ads, you are simply «renting» the traffic. The day you turn off your advertising budget, your customers disappear overnight. Google and Facebook make money, while your business is left empty-handed.

We therefore recommend all our clients to invest their marketing budget in search engine optimization (SEO).

Instead of paying 10 kroner per click forever, we build your website so that it ranks organically and naturally on Google. This requires effort at the beginning (through lightning-fast websites, technical SEO and solid content), but once you have captured a top position, the traffic is free and permanent. Customers also trust the organic search results much more than the paid ads.