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
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