"paid search ads etc have resulted in lots of clicks but absolutely abhorrent conversions in our case, whereas conversions for the more organic channels like forums etc are excellent (maybe a targeting issue...)"

Absolutely a targeting issue. Paid search should be able to produce traffic that converts at roughly the same rate as your non-brand organic traffic (at this stage most of your organic traffic).

How much it costs per click for that quality of traffic depends on your industry, and whether that's profitable depends on your margins. But that's the baseline. After all paid search traffic is the same as organic search in essence, it just depends where the searcher ends up clicking. For you, before you rank highly for core terms, paid search can drive volume you want.

This isn't any advice for the AI slop you're seeking but your line about targeting issues stood out to me as something definitely worth looking at. I don't know how to specifically guide you remotely but if I had to guess I'd advice you to look at your keyword targeting, swapping things away from broad match to exact match, cover more keywords if you can (since exact is narrower than broad) and add negative keywords liberally. Check your search term report for anything irrelevant and apply them as negatives.

If you're not using keywords because Google (or whoever) have pushed you to some 'smart' campaign, then switch to keyword targeting. The smart campaigns are fine but require finesse to handle their blunter settings options.

If in doubt, use AI to figure out keywords to prioritise and negatives to set by default. Or speak to a paid media consultant and get an account review from them, sometimes they'll do this for free.

Thank you for your thorough reply! I think we should give it another go and be more restrictive in targeting!

Speaking of paid ads: we tried google, bing, LinkedIn in the past. Do you have a preferred place that you recommend that you have seen better performance at than other places?

[flagged]