My opinion piece about Google yesterday drew some skepticism.
It feels like much of it came from Googlemeisters whose deep involvement with search may be making them sensitive to every tree but barely aware of the forest.
Yesterday's piece was all opinion. Here are some facts*:
- For searches involving people looking to buy something, almost 2/3 of clicks go to paid results, not natural (organic) results.
- 85% of above-the-fold real estate in Google for high commercial intent keywords is given to paid ads. 15% goes to organic results.
- On average, the top "organic" listing gets fewer than 9% of clicks. Meanwhile, the top 3 spots get over 40% of clicks.
- If an advertiser buys keywords for which he would already rank naturally, 89% of his traffic will be generated by the paid ads, not the organic results.
- According to a recent survey, without the right hand column, over 45% of respondents could not differentiate paid ads from organic search.
* Source: The War On Free Clicks, WordStream
My favourite Google trick is that the cursor automatically defaults to the search bar when you're on the page. Many people set Google as their homepage and many people are lazy.
ReplyDeleteSo, let's say they want a flight on American Airlines. They open their browser and type www.aa.com. Instead of going straight to the page, they actually perform a Google search. American Airlines is the top paid result. So Google makes money from AA simply by getting people to the site that they typed the URL of in the first place.
Interestingly, on Chrome, if you type a specific term into the address bar (let's say "americanairlines"), it takes you to a search results page. On Safari, it assumes you wanted the American Airlines site and takes you right there...
Tangential, pedantic math-related comment.
ReplyDeleteI am apparently caller number 1,915,579 to this blog.
On previous visits a similarly high, similarly impressive number in a similar position on the page has been billed as the number of page views.
I am sure you appreciate that page views is not the same as visits, visitors or any other definition of "caller".
If you've changed the underlying metric as well as its name then you fully deserve your position in the Power 1,137.
If you've changed the name but not the metric then you're still worthy. But I'm sure that, as a stickler for accuracy, you wouldn't want to be setting a bad example in terms of data usage.
Yours respectfully.
Bob: Excellent source for this one. It's based on a survey of advertising types, and it's presented as an immense unreadable infographic. On a social media web site.
ReplyDeleteIf only I could find some contrarian web site that could help me understand the problems with research like this.
But even if you believe the research, you've still got some issues: he's counting only a very specific set of searches, all of which deliver highly relevant results in the advertising. In his conclusion for why paid is beating SEO, he mentions relevance about ten times. He mentions the new Google ads that deliver a phone number at the very top. If I'm searching for an F-150, and I get a click-to-dial dealer number right in an ad, that's extraordinarily relevant and NOT misdirection.
So I still think your premise from yesterday is entirely faulty. But I still think you remain one of the few intriguing, thought-provoking writers. Her'es hoping you move way up the blog rankings!
Thanks for the followup, Bob. And thanks for the numbers.
ReplyDeleteStill, it's kind of hard for me to understand why you think a PPC ad for a specific keyword should rightfully belong to somebody. Why not think of it as ad space you can buy. Is that really so much different from the traditional advertising world?
@Geoff,
ReplyDeleteI thought most people used the internet to search for prices and information on cars WITHOUT having to talk directly to a dealer.
So a phone number is the last thing you would want to provide as the first link!
@Geoff,
ReplyDeleteI thought most people used the internet to search for prices and information on cars WITHOUT having to talk directly to a dealer.
So a phone number is the last thing you would want to provide as the first link!
Apologies for the double post.
ReplyDelete(I'm struggling with a dodgy vpn behind the Great Firewall and things are a bit laggy).
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49477730
ReplyDelete