Ad Words vs Standard seach placement

[SonicImaging]

Hi all, First I want to thank everybody for such a informative forum!!! Its been a great help getting my sites ranking better.

I have been working the past couple of months getting my site ranking better in Google by SEO and also by using adWords.

My question is what do people think about AdWords sponsered listing on keywords that you place well in the regular search engines. Should I not bid on those keywords and spend my money on keywords that I dont rank well in.

Also does adwords or other pay per click help ranking in the standard search engine? So if I stop bidding on these keywords could it affect my ranking?

Here is a link to the google page im looking at. Im on the top in sponsored listing and also in second place as PopcornSupply.com
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=cotton+candy+sugar&btnG=Search

thx in advance for the help
- Keith

[David Wallace]

First of all, PPC has no affect whatsoever upon the natural listings. While I have heard stories that running PPC ads in a contextual environment will help to get a new site indexed, it has no bearing upon how well your site places once in that index.

As far as doing PPC in conjunction with SEO for organic listings with the same phrases, there is really no problem in doing this. I think it would depend on how much competition you have in the PPC portion of the listings and where you are placing in the organics. Obviously if you were in the top three in the organics for a specific phrase and then the only PPC advertiser, you might then want to discontinue the PPC ad for that phrase.

That being said, the bottom line with PPC is that if you are making more money then you are spending as a result of it, then it is successful.

[Robert_Charlton]

Obviously if you were in the top three in the organics for a specific phrase and then the only PPC advertiser, you might then want to discontinue the PPC ad for that phrase.

Actually, this may be good reason to continue the ad.

Greg Jarboe at SES reported a symbiotic effect between top organic and top paid listings. Basically, he said, top rankings in both types of listings reinforce each other, tripling click through rates in both. This results in lower cost per click on your AdWords listing.

See my previous post on the subject...
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=29523#post29523

I agree that AdWords buys have nothing to do with your organic rankings.

[AussieWebmaster]

You need to get a tracking program - this way you will be able to see how many people buy from the paid listings and how many do it from the free listings.
Google has one for the paid listings but does not track the free/standard/organic listings
But you have to track...

[Nacho]

You need to get a tracking program - this way you will be able to see how many people buy from the paid listings and how many do it from the free listings.
Try the Urchin 6 On Demand . . . it's a charm!!! You can not only see which traffic is organic vs. ppc, but also geographic location, day parts, and a lot more. So, a program like this can for sure tell you if it's worth keeping both or not.

In my opinion, its all about real estate space on the search result page. If my pages can come up 10% or more (which could be 2/20 links), then I'm extremely pleased that I have better chances against having my users go somewhere else.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

First of all, PPC has no affect whatsoever upon the natural listings.

In general, you are right but absolutely not allways. I have, as well as others, experienced first hand how a very high PPC-budget CAN in fact influence the editorial teams. Money talks and search engines are in that sense not different than any other business ... However, it takes a lot of money - more than most companies spend on PPC :)

[SonicImaging]

I just added some tracking to save the referrer info from the visitor into the order. I did both the http referrer and ill also use a extra query string on all my adwords urls just in case. I also save the users IP address so I can pull out more info from the logs.

It will be interesting to see some reports from this.

I also added grabbing the search term from the referrer info. What do people think about if I have the search term from the referrer info? Should I put that in the product search box on the site or actually perform the search for the visitor?

I think I should just put the term in the product search box when available since I don’t want to change the page the customer got to from the search engines.

Thx
-Keith

[AussieWebmaster]

I just added some tracking to save the referrer info from the visitor into the order. I did both the http referrer and ill also use a extra query string on all my adwords urls just in case. I also save the users IP address so I can pull out more info from the logs.

It will be interesting to see some reports from this.

I also added grabbing the search term from the referrer info. What do people think about if I have the search term from the referrer info? Should I put that in the product search box on the site or actually perform the search for the visitor?

I think I should just put the term in the product search box when available since I don�t want to change the page the customer got to from the search engines.

Thx
-Keith
Basically, you need to have tracking for all possible terms you advertise on and be able to see what they cost (PPC and CPA) - then play with the creatives and the landing pages to improve your numbers.
A good tracking program will also give you results for organic search so you can find other terms to add to your PPC campaigns as well. And also see what terms you may want to concentrate SEO work for.

[SonicImaging]

Measure twice cut once. WOW after taking in better stats for a week its amazing the difference in what I thought was good keywords for my products and where the traffic/orders are coming from.

After logging searches done on my site I’ve found that at least 50% of my visitors use the search box and 90% of the time they search on the same term that they searched on from the search engines. I think ill work on adding the search term from the referrer info to my search box so all they have to do is click the search button. I also found that the search terms from the referrer were spelled correctly but over 70% of the searches on my site were not spelled right and resulted in not finding products. Half of these didn’t result in a sale!!! I’m going to look at a server based spell checker and fix the spelling during the searches.

From logging the referrer into each order I found that my traffic that ordered is split perfectly between google, yahoo, MSN, AOL and no referrer. I was surprised at the number of orders from beta.msn over the past couple of days.

I just added the adwords tracking to my site since the referrer information sent by Google is the same if you click on the organic listing or the adwords listing so I guess ill have to track that on Google. Then I can separate the orders from organic and adwords clicks.

You couldn’t be more right about tracking!!

Thx
- Keith

[AussieWebmaster]

Measure twice cut once. WOW after taking in better stats for a week its amazing the difference in what I thought was good keywords for my products and where the traffic/orders are coming from.

After logging searches done on my site I�ve found that at least 50% of my visitors use the search box and 90% of the time they search on the same term that they searched on from the search engines. I think ill work on adding the search term from the referrer info to my search box so all they have to do is click the search button. I also found that the search terms from the referrer were spelled correctly but over 70% of the searches on my site were not spelled right and resulted in not finding products. Half of these didn�t result in a sale!!! I�m going to look at a server based spell checker and fix the spelling during the searches.

From logging the referrer into each order I found that my traffic that ordered is split perfectly between google, yahoo, MSN, AOL and no referrer. I was surprised at the number of orders from beta.msn over the past couple of days.

I just added the adwords tracking to my site since the referrer information sent by Google is the same if you click on the organic listing or the adwords listing so I guess ill have to track that on Google. Then I can separate the orders from organic and adwords clicks.

You couldn�t be more right about tracking!!

Thx
- Keith
It is amazing what words do all the work... or need more work...