Small ecommerce, 6k a month in Google Ads running at a bit over 3x return, so it pays for itself but nothing compounds and the moment I stop, revenue stops. The plan was to move half the budget into content and links for twelve months. I have no in house writer and about four hours a week of my own time to manage it.
We ran both channels for four years and the honest comparison is payback shape, not payback size. Paid gives you revenue on day one and takes it away the day you stop. Content gave us nothing for about five months, then a slow ramp, and the pages we published in year one were still earning in year three. If your business cannot survive a two quarter dip, do not fund content by removing paid, fund it out of margin more slowly.
Two quarters is roughly what I feared. Half budget rather than all of it might be survivable, but only just.
Do not pause a profitable channel to fund a speculative one. Cut 20 percent, spend it on content, measure for two quarters, repeat if it works.
I did this the reckless way, turned ads off completely at the start of January to fund a content push. Revenue fell about 40 percent within a month, my cash position got tight, and it took five months of paid spend to get back to where I had been because the account had to relearn. If I did it again I would ramp down 20 percent a quarter and never let the account go cold.
Four hours a week and no writer is the part that worries me more than the budget. Content that works at ecommerce scale is category pages and buying guides that need product knowledge, and nobody outside your business has it. If you cannot commit a person, you are converting a working channel into a stack of unpublished drafts.
@csv_apologist · 4mo ago · 2 replies
Before you move a penny, work out how much of that 3x is people searching your brand name. Pause only the brand campaigns for two weeks in a couple of regions and watch what happens to total orders, not to the ads dashboard. In our case a meaningful share of what paid was claiming just walked through the organic result instead, so the true incremental return on that slice was much lower than reported. That test cost us almost nothing and changed the budget conversation completely.
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@first_dollar_fi · 4mo ago
Seconding the geo holdout. We found brand paid was mostly buying clicks we already had, but the non brand campaigns really were incremental, so we cut one and kept the other.
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