An quality, eye-opening article Dave.. keep them coming!

Another great post Dave.I honestly thought that the minimum bid regardless on adwords was 5 cents.I never sawa one cent bid before.Great article.

Nice post Dave.. Keep up the good work!

Have to agree with everything you’ve said there.

We recently took over a campaign that had previously been run by another agency, and over 90% of the traffic that they’d generated came from terms where they topped the natural search results, and 80% from terms on which they were the only bidder as well.

As a result, they were wasting the majority of their PPC spend on traffic that they’d probably have got for free.

We’ve redirected their cash into terms that they aren’t high on the search results for, and they’ve seen a significant increase in traffic to their site.

On the other hand, as our agency does SEO and PPC, I’ve had to stop bidding on many of the best terms in some campaigns, as the websites are optimised for them. Great for the companies in question, great for the SEO people, not so great on the weekly reports I produce!

Interesting case. Thans for sharing!

@Daniel & Bobbo – Thanks

@CustardMite – I hear you. A large chunk of my time is spent going through and managing reports. In fairness, Adwords and Analytics offers some pretty decent number crunching options. I don’t fully agree about removing a paid listing in all cases of a number one organic position however. In this example, the business was al full capacity and didn’t NEED the added cost of more bookings.

If you have an unlimited inventory (Software for example) or a massive inventory, I still think the more screen real estate you occupy the better. As I have mentioned before, as long as the visitor has a value higher than what you pay for the paid listing, it’s still a profit. I’d never take the risk of “Hoping” a visitor clicks on the number one ogranic listing because as I am sure you know, sometimes a user will not click it. It depends on the meta description or snippets call to action.

Very nice piece. I’ve been very surprised at how much PPC is affecting my traffic. I pulled back on it because one of my sites was placing well in the natural search, but without the PPC, my clicks and conversions have dropped.

Hi Dave,

Absolutely agree that there are circumstances where you would want both – but in this case, it was variations of the brand name, and nobody else was bidding on the terms, so people were almost certainly going to click on the free listing had the paid listing not been there – splitting the cost amongst the additional traffic would have led to very expensive clicks in this case.

But those clicks would have been lost to competitors, had the term been something else, and there been others bidding on the term.

I try to think in terms of whether the additional traffic is worth the total spend – and that’s something that has to be evaluated on a case by case basis, as you can’t really tell with any certainty how many clicks are being cannibalised – it’ll depend on what other links are on the site, the quality of the other adverts, etc etc…

But there’s no doubt at all in my mind that it’s certainly something that people should be thinking about, and agencies that deal exclusively in PPC have no real incentive to ask the question…

Not sure that I’m that keen on performance-based charging.

From my perspective, I’d feel more cautious about trying new ideas, if I know that they’re going to cost my business money if they don’t work (I’m happy enough to take risks with other people’s money!).

Also, from the client’s perspective, if we start performing far better than they were expecting, they may start suspecting our original estimates and forecasts. And let’s face it, if it’s a new campaign starting from scratch, they are a bit hit-and-miss to begin with.

Unscrupulous agencies could deliberately overstate the expected cost per click (or conversion) in order to get more money from their clients. We use a fixed fee, and as somebody who used to be a client, I’d be more comfortable with this, particularly if I only had a restrictive budget.

It’s always possible to ‘cheat’ to improve a statistic in isolation – cpc or cpa can be fiddled by reducing the bids, and getting less traffic but more cheaply. Clicks can be inflated with less relevant keywords or vague adverts…

I think the difference is in that my Agency are quite new, and in the past the majority of our clients have been quite small. Frequently, they have had no prior history on Adwords, or what they are expecting or willing to accept in terms of performance – in some instances not even knowing what their breakeven CPA would be (in the case of new companies).

This is changing over time, and perhaps we should consider offering different types of contract to different customers, though it’s not a decision for me to make.

I think that flexibility is probably important in our position, where we have clients with budgets ranging from £10 per day up, and if our competitors offer alternatives that we don’t (or vice-versa), it’s quite important…

At the moment, we send out a weekly report showing the trend of the major metrics over the last four weeks overall, and by adgroup. We also send out a monthly report with a more complete analysis of what’s been happening, what we’ve been doing, and what we’re planning on doing – I know that when I was on the other side of the fence, working for a retailer, this was what I wanted.

On the plus side, it means that there’s really nowhere to hide – if we drop the ball, or even fail to make improvements, they know almost as soon as we do!

Of course, there are clear downsides to this – random (for want of a better word) noise can lead to some interesting phone calls, particularly if my contact isn’t particularly numerate. And it limits the number of adgroups that I can have without losing reporting functionality.

On the whole, it’s a good thing, as it means that we have to keep working on their campaigns (it’s quite easy to spend 99% of your time working on the new campaigns, where improvements are easy to come by), and it means that our clients know that we’re giving them something for their money.

You’re welcome Mike. I suggest not only moving focus to organic but using them both as a one two punch approach.

Well, with enough work you can rank number one for a hundred search terms if they are “Long Tail Enough” :) But it’s a lot easier to rank for the less generic terms and pay for the more generic terms.

A common reason why an ad may not appear above the organic listings… the “ribbon ads” is that the ad has not yet been manually reviewed… ads MUST be manually reviewed in order to be eligible to appear on Google partner sites… as well as these “ribbon ads”.

@Dan P, Ads do not need to be manually reviewed to appear as sponsored listings above the organic results (top spot as apposed to right hand column).

You are right about the partner sites though. Also, ads must be reviewed manually before going live on the content network (for obvious reasons).

Hi Dan, I have just started a new campaign for a client. Brand new, new keywords, new adgroup, new URL and new ad text. Within minutes it was displaying in the number one position above the organic results.

Who told you it needs to be approved?

It is possible that your ads were manually reviewed very fast, which would explain this. I have verified this issue 3 times, so I am 99% confident on this.

Very interesting thread Dave… looks like this has been discussed elsewhere and that Dan’s content/keywords may have been flagged by Google.

This makes sense to me, as I am pretty sure they follow a similar approach to reviewing websites, generally automated/spidered and then when something weird or a flagged item pops up they go in and manually review it.

Dave,

Interesting enough… the problem with long tails is though that the time you spend on research trawling through the incoming and working out conversions only gives the client a tiny proportion of sales. In the case of this example I got my client right under the hotel for the NAME search… which surely is more important? no?

Many people view SEO and PPC as 2 sides of coin when in fact we can use them both at the same time. And the best way of doing this is to bid on the same keywords you rank highly for and send PPC traffic to a review’ site. Having traffic sent to your main site through a ‘neutral review’ site greatly boosts sales.

Hi Dave,
Fab post, I totally agree that using SEO and PPC to work together is the best way to secure long term results. Running a PPC campaign for a few weeks, months if necessary gives us webmasters a good solid idea of what keyword/phrases work and apply them to the SEO campaigns. Thanks very much for sharing. :)

Both they are very necessary and they must go in line together like part of a marketing strategy. At the outset he is recommendable to use PPC to obtain immediate results, while the positioning in finders works.

Thanks for the case studies. SEO and PPC are simple yet intensive concepts and things like case studies help newbies like me to better absorb the information. I’d love to see more such articles on your site.

On the other hand, you’ll generally get better PPC results for the less generic terms, and more impressions (and hence more savings) on the more generic terms…

But, as you say, trying to rank number one naturally for ‘mobile phones’ or ‘PDAs’ could be ‘challenging’…