Should I Forget About PPC And Concentrate on Search Engine Optimisation (Part 2)?.
In a previous post about PPC vs SEO. The answer was a resounding ‘NO’.
Just to hammer home the point, here is a summary of some recent research by Google :-
- 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic result on the first page of search results. All ad clicks in these situations are incremental.
- On average, for advertisers who appear in the top rank organic slot, 50% of ad clicks are incremental. This means that half of all ad clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when search ads are paused.
- For advertisers whose organic search results are in the 2nd to 4th position, 81% of ad clicks are incremental. For advertisers appearing in organic position of 5 or lower, 96% of ad clicks are incremental.
Here’s my summary of their summary:-
- AdWords is driving a *lot* of traffic to web sites for keywords where zero traffic would be coming from organic results.
- Even if you are the *number 1* organic result for a keyword, you can still get 50% more clicks with by using AdWords as well.
- If an SEO company charges you to get onto the first page of Google (position 5 or lower) – the amount of traffic you will get from that organic ranking is pretty much insignificant compared to what you can get from AdWords.*
*Disclaimer – this research was carried out by Google, so it may be slightly biased. But nevertheless, ignore this advice at your peril…
2 thoughts on “Should I Forget About PPC And Concentrate on Search Engine Optimisation (Part 2)?.”
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Jordan,
These kind of figures don’t suprise me. It’s in Google’s interest for PPC to make more and more money, and over
the years the organic placements have suffered as a result with ads blending in more and taking up more of the positions.
How long before there is 4 masthead ads??
I’m a strong advocate of PPC, and have many campaigns where PPC and SEO run successfully side by side.
These figures merely demonstrate that if you wish to broaden the net as much as possible then PPC can’t be overlooked.
SEO is great, but it lacks the reach that PPC can give.
I’d agree with your summary. I ran a recent PPC campaign on keywords that I ranked no1 organically, and it pretty much bears this out. The response was great, when I turned off Adwords, the inquiries dropped off significantly.
Yeah – Google are getting greedy – there is no doubt about it. Since they are now a PLC, their first duty is to their shareholders so this isn’t likely to change in the future..
But don’t get me wrong – SEO is brilliant – you only have to look at the huge amount of money it can save you in the long term, and bear in mind that there are still a lot of people who really don’t like clicking on adverts.