Many of you are probably wondering if you should use paid search to complement your search engine strategy — assuming you have a search engine strategy!
Let’s start by clarifying, for those of you who aren’t sure, what constitutes paid search? Well to use Google as an illustration, the following screen capture shows a search for ‘pickled herring’:
The Result in the light blue box at the top of the search results column as well as the items on the right side of page are all ‘paid search’ results. The actual, or what are referred to as organic, search results appear in the left hand column. You’ll notice that even a less than mainstream query, like pickled herring, can result in several hundred thousand (290,000 in this case) results. A popular search term, like cheap tickets, returns over 83,000,000 results so this becomes reason number…
1.) To get noticed by the search engines — and searchers — when your site isn’t drawing their attention ‘organically’.
For example, one of my clients has budgeted less a dollar a day for an AdWords campaign that’s focused on a key phrase at the heart of his business. The problem is that his site doesn’t show up in the top 100 organic results for this term. Yet this term is the top producing phrase in terms of delivering traffic from search engines accounting for almost 23% of his search traffic for the most recent month. What can you buy for a buck a day?
2.) They actually work. I mean people aren’t giving billions of dollars to Google and other internet ad sellers out of the kindess of their hearts. Google, according to AdWords guru Andrew Goodman, says about 15% of the time searchers will judge paid results more relevant than organic. From my own experience I find myself more willing to pursue paid results the further I am in the buying cycle, e.g., the more ‘commercially’-oriented my search.
Goodman finds, in reviewing results from the several hundred campaigns he’s been involved in, that between 1 and 5% of searchers click on these ads. By contrast, a direct mail piece that draws a 1 to 2% response rate is considered successful.
In addition, Google’s not so hidden agenda is to promote organic search for information, educational and government results while steering more commercially oriented response towards their on-line advertising programs. You can see this working in my query above (randomly chosen on the spot, by the way) which shows the first organic result as the pickled herring entry in Wikipedia (the amazing online user-edited encyclopedia) while the first paid result is from an herring importer. Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?
3.) This is a bit of a corollary to #1 but worth noting on its own. If you’re site lacks the content to really make a dent in the search engine’s algorithms you can use paid search to reel in search traffic.
Don’t get me wrong, you can go broke running an AdWords campaign on a heavily trafficed keyword but, with a little prudence, a little bit of investigation and the willingness to experiment you can enjoy some signficant success.
