Google Adwords

[2HousePlague]

What is Google Adwords?



Find buyers searching for what you sell.

With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to help us match your ads to your audience and pay only when someone clicks on them... more

Once upon a time, I had this opinion:

Owing to a higher level of Web search experience, the average surfer now KNOWS the difference between an AdWords ad and an organic result.

Surfers now understand perfectly well that those links on the right were put there by people who pay for them to be there. When you're looking for something you hope to get FOR FREE, knowing that a link is a paid ad is a negative.

Surfers are still largely ignorant of SEO methods that influence what's on the SERP, however. For this reason, surfers engage organic links both more frequently and with a greater degree of hopefulness.

Now it's important to understand how this divides traffic from the SERP into two categories -- one going to AdWords links, the other following organix.

Although there are a number of query terms that get enormous daily volume, the bigger volume (as a percentage of the whole of daily queries) is the sum of millions of queries, whose individual volumes are tiny.

And we all know from online marketing 101 that the closer you come to offering the precise thing the consumer was looking for, the higher the initial conversions, the higher the ultimate retention.

There can be no argument that the organic listings are MUCH more likely to reflect the specificity of the query -- when the query is specific. Even those of us who've managed keyword lists with tens of thousands of terms can tell you this is true.

So, surfers clicking on an AdWords ad (and, therefore, not an organic listing), are either:

A. Unclear in their desire, or

B. Taking a chance


In both cases, the likelihood for disappointment on the part of the surfer (and also for the AdWords advertiser, as a result) is much higher for AdWords clicks than for organic clicks.

Organic clicks, for being undertaken by the surfer with higher hopes, also lead the surfer down the "path of frustration" -- which is what I call bouncing around in TGPs, not finding what you want, getting hornier and hornier, etc. I don't have the numbers, but would bet confidently that far fewer surfers that engage organic links come back to the search engine, than those who engage AdWords links. Translation: a click on an organic result is more likely to produce a sale -- even if the purchase is made out of frustration or impatience

To summarize: Organic Link Clicks and AdWords Link Clicks ARE different, because of what we know (instinctively) and can verify (if we bothered to) is differrent between the surfers who make one choice or the other.

Things have changed. This is now my opinion:

Google has been working hard to improve the quality of its search results with, among other efforts, the institution of Trustrank. Now that trust factors figure into determining which organic listings Google displays on its results pages, relevancy and searcher satisfaction are increasing dramatically. The inevitable consequence of this is a reduction in average search time and a reduction of advertiser impressions per search. Fewer impressions sounds like a bad thing for advertisers, but it's not.

Many advertisers falsely believe that Adwords ads displayed on Google results pages are intended to compete with organic listings. This is not true. There is also the perception that the Adwords bidded-click system is designed to extract maximum revenue from the advertiser, with little concern for delivering the advertiser's ads to their most likely customers. This is also false... more
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