The official Google Adwords blog has a post today that answers a fairly common conundrum for new advertisers:
“You place an ad, and a user types in your keyword - now if the company you are advertising comes up on the first page in the main listings (the ones on the left) does that mean that google won’t show your ad?”
Well the short answer is no, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Read the post for the full answer and a couple of other related questions and their answers including:
- Being an advertiser with a tiny budget does not hurt (nor help) one’s chances of appearing in the search results
What the post omits to say is the value of your site appearing in both the search results and in the sponsored links (aka Google AdWords Ads) for a given keyword phrase. I saw a reputable study* that suggests that it is almost twice as probable that searcher will click on your site (ie. CTR - click thru rate) if your site appears in top position in both the ’sponsored links’ section and organic search results.
This makes sense because searchers are impatient; our eyeballs rest on the top of the page, we don’t typcially scroll down the page because we’re lazy but also because Google does a pretty good job of finding the sites most relevant to what we’re looking for.
This also makes sense because the fact that your site is prominently positioned in two places suggests to the searcher that you have invested in your online presence, are an authority site, that your site ‘is good enough for google, its good enough for me’. As we all know the top of the search results page has the highest CTR in any case.
Of course the same applies to Microsoft and Yahoo search ads and advertising.
* presented at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in ‘06 - focused on the US Hispanic and Latin America markets
2 responses so far ↓
1 Sham // Jan 18, 2008 at 4:09 am
Hi,
Suppose, my Ads are displayed only in PPC Listing but not in Organic Listing. What if Organic result content ( Other Company’s Content) has any influence on the searchers to click on itself rather clicking on my Ad?
2 j.o.coffey // Jan 18, 2008 at 4:41 am
Hi Sham - I’m not sure if I understand your question but let me attempt an answer (and feel free to contact me for any clarification).
Google estimated (around 2 years ago) that there is a 5% CTR (clickthru’ rate) for PPC ads. In other words, if 100 people search for ‘plastic surgery colombia’ approximately 95% will click on an organic listing and 5% will click on a PPC ad.
That said, there are other factors at play, such as:
- the quality of organic listings…in some business niches there are very few optimized sites which often means that the organic results for a given search term will appear less relevant than the PPC listings. In other words there is an opportunity for businesses (ergo, unlikely to be highly ranked) to use PPC and earn a large share of the market in this scenario. I think that this is the crux of your question…if the organic listing is just as compelling (ie. well written, relevant and has a call-to-action hook) as PPC listing that the likelihood of an organic listing to get the click is far higher than for a PPC ad.
- trust and experience…most people know that businesses can buy PPC ad space but can’t (directly) buy organic ranking position, which infers that if you have faith in Google’s ranking criteria that the organic listings are to be trusted more than an ad
- eyeball tracking studies show that when someone does a search that their eye trajectory has an F-shape on the search engine results page with the majority of the focus on the top left corner and very little focus on the right side of the page where the PPC ads are located.
The ideal scenario is to have your site highly ranked in the organic results for your target keywords and highly ranked in the PCC ads. In both cases it is extremely important that your copy is compelling, persuasive and cites the relevant keywords.
Hope this helps - JoC
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