The product always needs to be good. But targeted ads such as on Google allow entire categories of businesses to exist. My company would have never been started without Google AdWords - there would have simply been no cost effective way to find the users who needed the product.
"The product always needs to be good. But targeted ads such as on Google allow entire categories of businesses to exist."
With regard to niches, my experience has been the opposite.
If your niche is small enough, you can't properly bid on adwords for rare keywords because they are flagged as "low quality" and you are forced to either abandon those keywords or pay 10x for them to show.
This, of course, defies the entire raison d'etre of adwords - the whole purpose of which is (presumably) to bid on a keyword that targets that one rare person that searched for that.
But it can't be done - if only 5 or 10 people search for a phrase or keyword every day, it cannot be bid on properly.
I don’t know about the 5 to 10 search a day volume level - I was quite a bit above this. But I agree that if they don’t serve that volume level well, it’s sad and aggravating. That should be something that can really help people who are out of other options. Might it be a privacy issue? If an ad can be targeted to that level it can be used to address a single individual.
Sure, but you don't need to worry about conversion cost there.
I was faced with keyword combinations that had "natural" costs that were very low (and appropriately so, since I was the only person "bidding" on them). But then a few days later, "low quality score" and they ratcheted up the price 10x.
If you get a job out of it, the penalty doesn't really matter ... I was trying to convert $5/mo IaaS customers.
This is usually true but sometimes not. For example products like Grey Goose vodka make billions of dollars despite being indistinguishable from other quality vodka even by self-professed experts.
It's probably splitting hair at this point, but Grey Goose isn't bad vodka, it's just no better than other "good" vodkas (whatever "good" means in context of a product whose defining characteristic is the absence of characteristics). If GG was a foul-tasting vodka, no amount of advertising would save it.
this ^
I didn't say you need a better product, or the best product, but you need a great product. If people hear about your product, and they think it's great, then they'll buy it.
GG vodka is a great vodka (not a vodka pro but definitely in the high end of consumer vodka I believe), and coupled with their advertising they sell a lot of vodka.