What Happens When You Remove Paid Search Efforts

Posted onMay 17th, 2012 byadmin

Even if your website ranks #1 organically, paid search is an important part of your marketing plan.

Last year Google released the Search Ads Pause research study that looked at the correlation between paid and organic search results. Google concluded that if you were to remove your paid ads you would see an 89% drop in clicks. Scrutinizers immediately started asking questions. What happens if your brand is the top organic result for the keyword? Surely the results would be different than if your organic result was on the second page.

Our sales team here at Keyword Search Pros has been telling advertisers for years that they can’t pull their paid ads when they get higher organic rankings. In the quest to save some cash, companies come up with this strategy and feel it’s a revelation. Finally there is a study to go along with the argument.

“When we released the first paper, we had a lot of questions coming back, asking for more details-under what situations can you expect different numbers.” said David Chan, Google’s lead researcher for this study.

Chan went back out and furthered his research and released a new study on the interaction of organic results and paid search ads. After looking at the new study results, the 89% number makes a little more sense since paid search ads appear without an accompanying organic search result on the page 81% of the time, on average. A paid ad is accompanied by a top ranking organic result only 9% of the time, accompanied by a 2 to 4 ranking organic result 5% of the time, and accompanied by a lower ranking, 5 or lower, around 4% of the time.

The reality is that if sponsored ads are accompanied by organic ads 9% of the time, then out 100 keywords being bid on in Adwords, only 9 of them would have an organic result on the first page. So you can achieve higher (than organic position #1) exposure on (81%) more keywords than you could rank for organically. Now that’s easy exposure.

The study goes on to explain that even when advertisers have an organic ranking in the # 1 spot, 50% of clicks they get on ads are not replaced by clicks on organic search results when the ads don’t appear. “It is a very surprising result, and, I think in someways, it runs counter to what people would think but the data speaks for itself,” said Chan.

The Big Picture: Those who ponder an “either/or” philosophy when it comes to PPC vs. SEO will have to learn the hard way. All stats aside, if an advertiser does paid search, he will develop a certain level of return. Improving organic exposure will only serve to increase the return level from that previous benchmark. He then will be accustom to this new level of return. If he stops running the paid search campaigns, he will immediately see the drop in sales and scatter to get the return levels back to where they were.

Here at Keyword Search Pros, we advise clients to evaluate what’s working and not working. If paid search represents a positive return, then do it. If organic results drive visitors and returns, then do that too. We have to let go of the “either/or” and replace it with “and/both” when they both drive results. Advertisers who focus on cutting cost from things that work are really focused on cutting sales.

Check out Google’s Impact of Organic Rank on Ad Click Incrementality for some great visuals to help better understand the study.

3 Ways to Lower Adwords Conversion Costs with Negative Keywords

Posted onMay 9th, 2011 byadmin

Most advertisers use negative keywords in the most limited fashion. Limitations occur both in the way advertisers retrieve their potential negative keywords, as well as where and how their negative keywords are executed. It’s very common to see advertisers try their luck guessing as to which negatives to use and it’s obvious those advertisers aren’t paying attention to which specific queries people ACTUALLY type into the Google search.

When you, as an advertiser, can discover not only which queries people actually make but also what keywords and ads they trigger, you can take back control over your account and learn how easily people convert under the proper settings.

Negative keywords have other purposes than to simply weed out irrelevant inquiries. Here are 3 simple ways you can increase conversions by using negative keywords. (more…)

Google Snakes An Additional $5.5 Billion from Adwords Customers in 2010. What about 2011?

Posted onApril 20th, 2011 byadmin

Last month I read a news brief on Google’s projected numbers for 2011. It was no surprise the damn thing had a green arrow pointing north. With Larry Page at the helm of Planet GOOG (ticker), he has a major undertaking to GOOG shareholders. The idea of making money hasn’t changed. However, one could only question if the plan for making money has changed. Frankly, it’s been the same plan all along.

Google published its projected increase for CPC (cost per click) in 2011 as 5%, the same as last year. When I heard this, I choked on my Americano. There is no way Google’s CPC only increased 5% last year. They must have done one of those weighted means we forgot about in Stats class. Even after digging up a subjective number, we found an 8% increase in CPC that was published by Jefferies & Co.’s analyst, Youssef Squal.

Youssef may not be so quick to overstate but I will. It’s more than that. It’s hard for us to tell because we manage our clients CPC down. When you think about all the advertiser accounts that go unmanaged or that are managed by a majority standard, 8% is the difference between a CPC of $1.00 and $1.08. Come on!

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Lower Conversion Costs While Increasing Sales Return

Posted onApril 25th, 2010 byadmin

Lowering Conversion Cost without lowering sales return has always been the advertiser’s dilemma. Increasing return has always been an amazing feat. Advertisers have pushed for the lowest conversion cost. But at the end of the sales day, they paid closer attention to sales volume and return than conversion data. As professional Adwords managers, its expected that we’ll be asked to lower conversion cost for our clients. Now at what cost can we do this? The fastest way to lower conversion cost is to lower CPC and the fastest way to do that is to lower the keywords bids and consequently lower ranking, exposure, traffic, and sales return.

So in our business, the client has passed the dilemma onto us. How are we to manage client expectations with lower conversion costs while increasing the sales revenue?

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Unmasking the Abomination of Quality Score

Posted onApril 24th, 2010 byadmin

Dear Quality Score Victim,

I have to admit: I’ve been dying to write an updated piece about Quality Score (QS) since 2 years ago. The game has changed forever and I’ve spent more time gritting my teeth and cursing at my monitor (logged into Adwords) than ever before. The reason is because we were told quality score was to help ‘reward’ advertisers for constructing highly relevant campaigns and adgroups. But its all different now. Where’s the reward?

When QS was first introduced to advertisers in 2005, it was just a static score used to determine the minimum CPC based on the ad relevancy to its keywords. Over the next five years, Google would add in: CTR, landing page relevancy, account history (a combine average of all CTR’s in an account, and (the best part) “other relevant factors.” I’ve always gotten a big laugh out of “other relevant factors” because as I would dissect QS, I could see there was much more unexplained reasoning for low quality scores.

An Illustration of Traditional Quality Score (Pre-2009-2010)

In August of 2008, Google restructured QS and made it a “real-time” score that would take effect as soon as someone searched on Google. Some of the other differences Google made were: replacment of minimum CPC  to “first page minimum bid”, landing page quality, and landing page load time. In expectation of a rough change to quality scores, we were surprised that existing advertisers who had been advertising a while, didn’t really see much change…until 2010. Now we go into the accounts and look around at QS but we’re not in Kansas no mo.

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