As a follow-up to my last post, “When Google rankings affect your small business’ bottom line,” I wanted to provide some real data for my claim that a web site can get a significant increase in traffic by paying for search engine advertising even though they have a #1 search engine ranking for their niche search term.
My client is currently #1 in Google for their niche phrase, which is a moderately-competitive two-word search phrase. The client’s web site has always been in the top 5 results for this phrase, and just recently re-gained the #1 ranking.
The client also pays for a Google Adwords ad for the exact two-word phrase that they are currently ranked #1 for.
In the last week, the client has gotten 59 visits from the #1 Google ranking, and the client has gotten 54 visits from the paid Google ad. You can see that the client nearly doubled their web site traffic from this niche search term by paying for advertising. What’s more is that the paid ad had a 6.78% conversion rate, proving that people not only clicked — they bought.
March 14th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Kevin Hillstrom says:
Would the business have had 113 visits, or 59 visits, or somewhere in-between, if paid search were not done at all?
March 14th, 2007 at 11:34 am
Terry says:
How many of those paid clicks were competitors just looking ate the landing page? Many asssume that ppc fraud is an intentional devious act when in actuality, I frequently visit my competitors paid listings to study their landing pages. I would personally never add to the cost of my budget by placing paid ads on a page where I was ranking in any position.
March 14th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Rick Whittington says:
Kevin, good point about the assumption that the pay-per-click ads might be cannibalizing the natural search results. Since the average position of the paid search ad is about 3, and based on the heatmaps of Google search result pages, I would assume that the natural results would have gotten more clicks had I not advertised, but I can’t prove that. What are your thoughts from your experiences?
Terry, I seriously doubt that the competitors are clicking on the ads. The ads have such high conversion rates that I find it hard to believe that a competitor would do this. Sure, they might be clicking a handful of times, but I know for a fact that this industry doesn’t have a lot of competitive analysis activity. Plus, I can’t imagine that anyone clicks the ads for fun or in a devious nature. It happens, but I don’t think it happens in this industry.
March 20th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Kevin Hillstrom says:
My thoughts are the same as yours, natural probably would have gotten more clicks, but you can’t prove it.
That’s what makes all of this stuff fun!
March 20th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Rick Whittington says:
Kevin,
You’re correct that we as marketers can’t prove that natural search engine listings would have gotten more clicks. After all, I wouldn’t want to test this by turning off PPC listings, or vice versa, getting de-listed from search engines.
That’s why I love this industry — there’s always a challenge!
March 27th, 2007 at 11:52 am
Idris says:
when you get more number of visits from natural what is the point in going for paid. Again, if both has considerable amount of traffic you need to check with individucal conversion rates.