What are better alternatives than advertising with Google Adwords?

By promoting Google Offers, will Google Search lose its objectivity and reliability for many users, and will merchants who are not Google Offers merchants look for marketing alternatives to Adwords?

• Answer:

  Well, this is a deeper question than just that - over time, Google loses its objectivity in many facets, not just the offers you would see in Google Offers. Some already say they'll migrate slowly to showing mostly results that make them money (AdWords vs. Organic). Regarding your question about Google Search losing its objectivity and reliability for USERS - I don't think that would happen at all. Offers of any kind of a minuscule part of online search, meaning, most of the queries are not related at all so I don't think users would migrate from Google just because the fact that when they search offers they'll get stuff that are promoted by Google. Put aside the fact that the offers that'll be promoted will be probably be just fine and good bargains like any other offers site. As for merchants looking for marketing alternatives - I see many reason why savvy merchants will migrate more and more to other advertising platforms, but Google is still the top dog - no one (at the moment) can compete with the sheer traffic you can get when advertising on Google, especially for local offers since that amount of traffic is very low to begin with. Also - Google Offers are bargain deals, like Groupon and other daily deals sites - most merchants simply don't give those kind of deals on a daily (or monthly or quarterly) basis, let alone spend search marketing dollars on promoting them (the margin is problematic as it is).