Using Sponsored Plus Natural Listings

[DWeiss]

I understand that the benefit of showing both sponsored and natural listings for a search result is to saturate the page with your ad. But at the same time, clicks received by the natural listing take away clicks from your sponsored listing but not impressions, lowering your quality score. This would cause you to pay a higher CPC for your position. Is this penalty worth having the ad appear a second time? Is this a flaw in the way Google determines positions for paid listings?

[seodude16]

I think there are a few other factors that would balance out the lowering of the Q score due to your own organic rankings reducing CTR to your sponsored ad.

1. You mention saturating but I think the biggest benefit is actually blocking a competitor from advertising above your natural ranking. This blocking technique does give you additional saturation but more importantly keeps competitors from trumping your high natural ranking with a PPC ad. When to give up this blocking ad is normally determined by the cost of the PPC spot. If the term is a high cpc term, then it may be cost efficient to not use the block.

2. Eyetracking research has shown that the PPC ads above the natural listings are the hottest spots on a search result page(this should be self-evident as the PPC engine want to place the ads in the most appealing place for would be searchers so they can make money from the ad). So if you are not in the top 2-3 natural rankings having a ppc ad above the organic rankings has considerable effect on the amount of traffic you will receive. If you are below the fold organically you will almost always want to have a PPC ad in tandem with your organic listing. Where I would not use the PPC/Organic tandem is if you can only afford a listing on the right side. Again eyetracking has shown that most right side ads are ignored by searchers. These right side ads probably do more damage to your Q score than a top PPC ad Blocker listing.

Naturally, anytime you use a PPC ad in tandem with an organic listing you are giving the searcher two options to come to your site, one of which is free and one which costs money. If this is an issue, then I would suggest making your PPC adtext be "uncompelling" such that it is used as a blocker but doesn't get a high CTR. This strategy works best when you have an organic ranking of 1 or 2. Hopefully they bypass the uncompelling PPC ad and instead click on your organic listing which costs you nothing.

[abbottsys]

..Is this penalty worth having the ad appear a second time? Is this a flaw in the way Google determines positions for paid listings?
I do a lot of adwords advertising, even on keywords where I have good organic rank. My answer: Yes, to your first question and No to your second.

[AussieWebmaster]

There have been reports (and my own experiences) that show your CTR increases if you have front page organics and top listings...

just having a listing in both places reinforces your position in the space.

[beu]

The key here is to own the most real-estate above the fold and to get eyeballs. That said, you can always make more content and new URLs for landing PPC.

[lizcamps]

Hi,
In our experience we've seen having top organic and PPC ad positions are synergistically effective.

Going back to the comment about eyetracking, some of those studies also demonstrate that people spend literally *milliseconds* on each bit of copy, whether paid or natural. So having 2 spots versus one gains a 2X probability of being clicked. In fact in our experience it's more like 2.5X

Also if one of your drilldown pages is indented under your higher-level organic result, then you have 3X chances of getting clicked. Actually more like 3.9X in our experience.

Are the PPC clicks a waste of money? In my opinion, no, for the following reasons:

- You can use different copy for organic search results and PPC ad copy. They can play off each other, reinforce each other, appeal to different audiences, etc.

- Different types of people will click on different kinds of links. Some people only click on organic results, especially if they're looking for peer-reviewed or "unbiased" info. Others favor PPC results when they're looking to buy something. I personally click both for different purposes when shopping/resarching, so I understand this dynamic.

- 2.5 is more than 2, and 3.9 is more than 3 - I guess that's the simplest way to put it

Hope this helps!
Liz