Stupid to pay for keywords you already 'own' oranically?

[skb]

Hi

Would you bet for keywords where you are already ranking nr 1 organically, and pretty much the market leader - beating all your competitors on price and selection?

We are betting on a lot of keywords where we are ranking nr. 1 and really the ONE shop to buy from. We have nice conversion rates, and it looks REALLY good. But my 'fear' is that we are paying alot of money on clicks from visitors who would have bought from us even if we where not showing up with our adwords sponsored links!

Do you know of any statistics about if the ones who click on the sponsored links, also click on the organic ones?

What would you do in our situation?

[AussieWebmaster]

You should run both - there are studies that show you improve the click thru rate of both the organic and the paid links when they are both there near the top

[skb]

Originally Posted by AussieWebmaster

You should run both - there are studies that show you improve the click thru rate of both the organic and the paid links when they are both there near the top

As I said we are ranking nr 1 organically. We are using pretty much the same ad text in our adwords as in our organically listing! It really doesn't make sense to me, that it would be more profitable betting for these keywords than not betting!

Any clue on how to make a valid test of what would be most profitable?

[AussieWebmaster]

stop the paid search and see what happens to your numbers is the easiest way - do a test for 2 weeks

you have the numbers already for when they both run together

[jag]

Why don't you set a goal and check paid vs non-paid keywords clicks difference?

Best,

[SanDiegoSEO]

I disagree with the norm. I think it's better to stop paying for the phrases you own organically, and redirect that spend budget on terms you need more help on.

However if there are sites that are aggressive on the terms you stop bidding on, you could lose revenue to those sites.

[skb]

thanks for your answers.

[AussieWebmaster]

let us know how you decide to run it all

[TigerWoodsOfSEM]

I would strongly advise against removing your paid brand terms and here are just a COUPLE of reasons why.

Your competitors now don't have to compete against you for your brand terms! If you're not buying your name, your competitors definitely will.

PPC copy updates in seconds. Take advantage of this so you can update promotions or anything about your business that is new or changing along the way. Organic copy takes longer.

Site links available to all now, can direct your customers to deeper pages of your site. Learn what they want!

Many studies have shown searchers interact with your brand and recall it more when it's shown more times on a SERP. PPC is needed to support this.

If cost is your issue, run your brand terms on all 3 match types and measure performance at the match type level. With the use of negatives and/or pausing inefficient match types, your ROI will go up and your costs down.

[AussieWebmaster]

nice summary Tiger - guess you had time to read up while in rehab

[AccuraCast]

Have you checked your Goals in Google Analytics (or whatever tracking solution you use) to see whether your conversions are coming from paid search or organic listings?

[bhartzer]

skb, there are plenty of studies out there there have shown that showing up organically for a keyword phrase and also bidding on it is actually better than just showing up organically (or vice versa).

I would definitely test it, though, with your own particular situation. Test the PPC ad copy, as well, to make sure that people aren't just clicking (or not clicking) on the PPC ad because of the ad copy.

[Janna122003]

Originally Posted by skb

Hi

Would you bet for keywords where you are already ranking nr 1 organically, and pretty much the market leader - beating all your competitors on price and selection?

We are betting on a lot of keywords where we are ranking nr. 1 and really the ONE shop to buy from. We have nice conversion rates, and it looks REALLY good. But my 'fear' is that we are paying alot of money on clicks from visitors who would have bought from us even if we where not showing up with our adwords sponsored links!

Do you know of any statistics about if the ones who click on the sponsored links, also click on the organic ones?

What would you do in our situation?

Well for me if your keywords are already showing on organic search it's useless to bid for it. It's a waste of money since we already know that there's lot of invalid click on adwords.

[AccuraCast]

Originally Posted by Janna122003

we already know that there's lot of invalid click on adwords.

We do?

Un-checked click fraud on AdWords is really low, far as most recent tests have shown.

Do you have any real recent studies / research / proof to back up your "facts"?

[AussieWebmaster]

I have to agree with AC - Janna do you have proof

[jag]

Seems like you are in old age of Google Adwords. May be very few in content networks. Even for this you have options to place the Ads in trusted sites through Ad content placement. Do you have any invalid clicks proof to share with us?

Originally Posted by Janna122003

It's a waste of money since we already know that there's lot of invalid click on adwords.

Best,

[AussieWebmaster]

I always list for brand name - why give your competition the ability to ride on your name - plus the conversion is great

[Brian Sekerak]

I have to agree with Aussie on this, you should always think of your Paid Search and SEO as a team and not as separate entities. The biggest reason, to everyone's point is not letting your competition get the edge over your organic, however there are few other reasons as well.
1. You can optimize the message - While this is limited to 25 in head line and two 35 body lines, you can promote any upcoming initiatives in a timely manner.
2. Google is starting to get more creative with PPC - With the usage of site links in your PPC campaigns you can now start to gain an understanding of what messaging is attracting your customers, and provide them with a more usable experience.
3. Just the overall testing and insight you can gain from PPC I feel is worth the money spent.

Overall, whether you purchase the same keywords as you target organically should always come down to one thing, the goals of your account.

[AussieWebmaster]

welcome to the board Brian

[Discovery]

I will simply chime in to support using PPC in combination with SEO organic rankings.

We see instant and dramatic impact to our SEO conversion volume when we turn OFF our PPC campaigns. There is no doubt, that when you have both a PPC listing with a high SEO ranking they compliment each other.

The visitor's click behavior we have observed over the years is interesting to me. When we run PPC and have a high organic, our organics increase and the PPC click throughs hardly increase.

So visitors are either being courteous or simply prefer clicking on organic listings.

False clicks and click fraud.
There has been massive increases in click fraud and false clicks in 2010 at Google and Yahoo. Bing with its lack of traffic and small content network has not seen the same activity. We have seen at least a 40% increase this year alone in most of our client accounts. There is no doubt this is a major issue as the false clicks skew all performance stats. Worse is it makes tracking ROI at a campaign/adgroup level difficult as you only get a lump sum Click Quality credit at the account level, but do NOT know where those refunded clicks should be applied. When the % of false clicks is low the skew is small, however when it is as large as it has been this year it really puts a cloud around your analysis.