Effects of Listings in Paid versus Organic Search

As you may noticed in my previous post, the organic search dominates the landscape – 85% of searchers click on natural results. The benefits of natural search are obvious and we will learn more about it during our next researches, this is why we will try to focus rather on paid search this time. It is clear also that we are talking about PPC campaigns oriented on direct user response, as somewhat opposed to CPM branding campaigns.

No matter how strange might sound but in spite of the 85% share PPC campaigns may often prove to be more efficient when it comes to well defined marketing objectives. What Google states for adwords may be easily extrapolated to paid search in general:

Paid search offers precise targeting and measurability, as well as pinpointed reach, making possible to achieve a high ROI (Returning of Investment) on a large scale. There are 3 main characteristics that synthesizes these advantages:

1. Relevance

One of the biggest benefits paid search offers is the ability to precisely target ads to users based on their interest, as well as a number of other factors like location, language, and demographic.

2. Return on Investment (ROI)

Online advertising is thoroughly measurable, making it easy to tell whether or not you’re meeting your advertising goals. Every user’s click is tied to a particular ad, keyword, and search query, all of which you can track and decide to improve whenever you like.

3. Reach

Every day, Internet users conduct millions of searches on SEs. By using paid search, you have the opportunity to capture any segment of that broad worldwide audience that’s actively looking for products, services, information, and websites.

The ROI and PPC can be tracked and proved more reliably than SEO, therefore it has been considered a more accountable marketing channel. It also seems like when the budgets are tightening and the focus is shifting to the highest ROI search investments, the SEO strategies take over.  But results are better when the natural search ins incorporate into a existing paid search campaign. The CTR goes up and conversion rate also.

The idea is that a search page provides you with more than one opportunity to put your name in front of the user. For an experimented marketer it is an easy task to take advantage of this. Though some users don’t make the distinction between natural and paid search results, it is generally thought that the majority of users are able to recognize paid search listings. Plus, this doesn’t influence dramatically the results of SEO or paid campaigns.

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