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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Thought this stat from the "Search improves the bottom line" was a little lame:

89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused.*

Google Search Ads Pause Studies, July 2011 *For those who have been running paid search campaigns.

My parsing of this interprets it as: "89% of advertisers aren't dumb enough to compete with their own organic SEO traffic by placing paid ads sponsoring the same keywords."

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I have organic listings ranked in the top 1-3 spots for my niche and I'm still buying Adwords for the same keywords, because PPC really does drive different traffic compared to organic. A few months ago Google suspended my account (apparently by mistake) and I noticed a significant drop-off in traffic. When my account was reinstated, I was happy to be paying for traffic again.

Are you saying it is worth it for the NY Times to advertise on the search term "NY Times"? I see examples like this all the time but it makes no sense to me. In fact, the only ad-links I click on are these.

You just gave me my first data point from the web site owners perspective ... that your traffic goes up enough for it to be worth it. Why do you think this is the case? I would really appreciate any insight on this!

I would say it is. I know my parents routinely click on the ads at or near the top of the google page thinking they are the legitimate search results.

You're right. But that doesn't make sense to me. I do the same thing. The point is that I would end up clicking on the search result anyways had the paid link not been there. What am I missing here?

It is a very cheap way (quality score is high for your own business name) to advertise the fact that "this is a business that is reputable/savy/spending enough to invest in ads and appear on Google." I really don't know how much that is worth, but it must count for something. Especially if you use Adwords for branding campaigns.

You're correct. I guess it could be viewed as an insurance policy against falling out of the top search results?

The other viewpoint would be that it prevents your competitors from doing the same.

Depends, in some cases, for stuff that converts really well, it's not such a bad idea. Improves your chances of getting a click. I think stuff like bidding on your precise company name is probably a waste in a lot of cases where the person is already searching for you and you have little/ no real competition on the term.

What if the competition is there above your organic results?

It's all about CAC and many times showing up in both places returns an excllent conversion rate. AdWorda users who blindly bid on any keyword without this type of tracking are dumb, not advertisers who bid for already well performing organic terms.

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