Leadership Journal, a publication of Christianity Today, recently posted a good article about Radiant Church in Colorado Springs which is using Google AdWords to draw new people to its website and its church. After 2 years of using AdWords, the number of first-time guests who learned about Radiant through the Internet is up 25%.
If you’re not familiar with AdWords, those are the paid ads that show up above and along side the search results when you search for something in Google. Advertisers pay per click on their ad. Because the price per click is determined through bidding and there is relatively little competition for church-related keywords, it’s very affordable for churches to use AdWords.
Radiant Church caps their monthly AdWords budget at $50.
It would not surprise me if they were paying as little as $0.10 per click, which could mean as many as 500 new visitors to their website each month for only $50. Pretty good, wouldn’t you agree?
Have you used AdWords to advertise your church, school, ministry, or business? Are you going to give it a try?
Here’s a link to the full article and thanks to Kurt for blogging about it first at Church Marketing Online.
[…] I read a recent article in Christianity Today and a referring blog post here (and their apparent “sister” site…?) about that shared how one congregation experienced a “large increase of traffic” because of their use of Google Adwords. […]
[…] Last week in Church Growth by Google AdWords I wrote about a story that first appeared in Christianity Today describing how Radiant Church in Colorado Springs used Google AdWords to draw new visitors to their church. ChurchCrunch responded with an article claiming Google AdWords is not worth it. However, there quite a few points in that article that I disagree with and lead me to a different conclusion. […]
I have produced and managed Adwords pay per click campaigns (also on Yahoo, MSN/Live, etc) for our church. With most visitors now doing their "research" to find out more details about the church and pastor before driving into the parking lot, placement of ads on search engines pointing them to your website is efficient and appropriate. We must remember that search is self-directed — they are seeking information, it is not interruption advertising like television ads.
We have had good results in the past and look to continue using search advertising in the future.
Cool. How are you determining that you've had good results? What tools are you using? What numbers are you looking at?