Paul North August 12th, 2011
I’m often asked about the benefits of running pay per click campaigns for keywords that a website already ranks highly for in the organic listings, particularly when the keywords are brand terms. Often, it’s not a straight forward answer, because as with many aspects of search things depend on the market sector, customer expectations, type of keyword, time of year, layout of the search page and many other factors.
For that reason, when I noticed the following data this week, I thought I’d seize the opportunity to blog about it and use in future as evidence of one benefit of combining paid and organic search. I always struggle to recall good blog posts and studies on this anyway.
Now, it’s important that I stipulate the following conditions of this keyword and website example because the data is easy to misunderstand. Without giving away my client’s keyword strategy, I can tell you this is a non-brand keyword, 2 words long and commonly used. The client has ranked 2nd in Google for over a year. The market is not one with well-known brands and so searchers are not influenced by familiar names in the SERPs.
The following graphs show daily click data for the same keyword from Jan 1st to August 10th 2011. At the beginning of April, we reduced the bids for the Adwords keyword because the costs per conversion were simply too high to justify spend any longer. What is interesting to see is what that action did for clicks on the organic ranking. Since April, there are clearly fewer clicks on the same keyword in organic search.
Paid (Jan 1st-Aug 10th 2011)
Organic (Jan 1st-Aug 10th 2011)
It’s a decent example of one of the benefits Google posits for Adwords: using paid search can help create more clicks for your site for your organic rankings as well as the ad itself. The reason is that searchers see 2 results for your site; double the amount of information and that creates a greater reassurance that your site is relevant for their query. As a result, they become more likely to click through. It’s particularly effective when they have never heard of anyone else in the results because they have only the information in front of them to go on.
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Siddharth Dhawan April 21st, 2011
So what is Quality Score? According to Google:
“Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.”
Quality Score, as the name suggests, is a quality scoring method for Pay per Click Ads. It is an assessment by Google AdWords (and now other search engines) of an individual keyword and its ad, which, in combination with the bid amount determines the ranking of the ad relative to competitors.
The primary factor for determining Quality Score is the click through rate (CTR) for each ad, but Google also considers the match between the keyword and the occurrence of the keyword in the ad copy, historical click through rates, and the engagement of the searcher when they click through to the site as well as the speed at which the page loads.
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Martin Soule March 29th, 2011
The Farmer update has shaken the world of SEO in the USA recently and was undoubtedly rolled out with the end user’s benefit in mind – ensuring the most relevant results for any given search. Hurray! Good for Google! Does that then mean that the latest changes to Adwords were rolled out for the benefit of its advertisers?
Unquestionably, many of the changes that Google has made to Adwords over the last 18 – 24 months have been to the benefit of its users. As a PPC management company, we know as well as anyone the impact that ad extensions (for example) can have on CTRs and conversion rates; ergo users are finding paid results more and more relevant. However – and call me a cynic – I would argue that Google’s latest changes to Adwords are purely for the benefit of advertisers, and hence to the benefit of Google’s bottom line.
Google is refining the art of disguise, to the benefit of its advertisers.
So, let me explain my cynicism…
Google is making its ads much more similar in appearance to the organic listings. Around 70-80% (depending on your sources) of search engine users ONLY use organic listings, so there is logic in disguising the paid listings as organic to trap the less savvy searchers. But how exactly has Google done it?
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Paul North January 13th, 2011
A client received an email yesterday that purported to be from Google Adwords. He forwarded it to me as we manage his account and normally he doesn’t get any correspondence from Adwords.
As you can see it is telling him that some of his ads have stopped and he must click a link to restart the ads and see tips on how to avoid future stoppages. The email is another phishing scam but is one of the more accomplished efforts I’ve seen. It stands up quite well to light scrutiny. Clicking the link takes people to a page where they are prompted to enter their login details, password and personal information.
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Anant Swarup August 3rd, 2010
A Landing Page, better known as a Micro Site, is a page created essentially for a Pay Per Click campaign. It is this page that a web page visitor reaches on clicking a PPC or a CPC advertisement listed on web search results. A Landing Page is specifically designed for marketing a particular product or service. Alternatively a SEO expert uses a landing page for the purpose of evaluating an advertisement’s effectiveness as also the efficiency of the keywords and keyword phrases incorporated in the search results.
A Landing Page is often further categorised into a “reference landing page” and a “transactional landing page”. A reference landing page exhibits all information relevant to a web page visitor in the form of text, images and other web resources. A Landing page’s effectiveness is judged by the revenue value earned by the advertisement. Meanwhile a Transactional landing page is designed with the aim of immediate sale of product and services. A web page visitor performing a desired action is termed as “conversion”. A Landing page’s effectiveness and quality is thus measured in terms of its conversion rate.
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