Hopefully that headline got your attention!   Yes, you did read it correctly – Google’s research shows that 81% of the time the paid search advertiser does not have a corresponding organic ranking.  So the opportunity of 1 + 1 = 3 actually rarely happens.   I believe this is primarily due to many companies not being aware of what is happening between their paid and organic activities but that is another post.

I had commented on their original research that incorrectly stated that if you have paid and organic there is an 8% increase in traffic.   In March Google put out their “revised” research on the impact of organic rank on paid clicks. I wrote a pretty scathing review of the research which I would like to think helped encourage them to go back to the drawing board.    The part I objected to what that they did not account for those words where the advertiser was not ranking.  Of course if you don’t rank for a term you will see an increase in paid search clicks

In the updated research titled “Impact of Organic Ranking on Ad Click Incrementality” they looked specifically at what happens when they have organic rankings and take away the paid.  This helps show the collaboration or cannibalization of the two.   They even did a neat info graphic that I will dissect to help explain what they found and the implications to search marketers.

Source: Google http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/impact-of-organic-ranking-on-ad-click.html

81% of the Advertisers DON’T HAVE an Organic Listing

Yes, that is what they found.  Of the words in the test, the advertisers that had a paid search ad running “did NOT HAVE an associated organic result 81% of the time.”   At first I was shocked by this but then we see this on nearly every data load we do into our Keyword Management Suite.  We often find the typical company only actively manages a fraction of the words in their paid campaigns in their SEO campaign.

Clearly, if you don’t have an organic listing then you won’t get additional consideration and the ONLY opportunity for interaction is “renting the traffic” via the paid listing.  They continued with the analysis and found that only 9% of the time the advertiser also had the #1 search results position, 5% of the time the advertiser was ranking in the 2 to 4th position and 4% of the time they were in a position #5 or greater.  So clearly, there can be a case made for rank checking to make sure that you do have organic results especially for high value terms.

I have talked about this recently in How do your Expensive PPC Kewyords Perform in SEO? after finding so many companies do not even know how many of their highest Cost Per Click keywords are performing in SEO.  We are updating our application to look for this anomaly specifically.  In preliminary tests we are finding that in some cases it is much worse.  We have found a few cases where it is as much as 98% of the time there is no corresponding organic listing in the top 5.

66% of the clicks happen when there is NO Organic Search Listing

So if we don’t even have an organic listing 81% of the time when there is a paid listing how does this impact the click rate.   Google found that 66 percent of the clicks occur when there is no organic listing for the advertiser.   Duh, that is the only thing they can click.

So what we all want to know is what happens in the 9 percent of the time when we do have both paid and organic listings.

• 99% of ad clicks with no organic results are incremental.  – Duh!  You can’t get a click from Organic if you don’t have organic so any clicks from paid are incremental.
• 50% of ad clicks with #1 organic result are incremental – this is what Google wanted to hear to counter advertisers that if they have a #1 listing then they don’t need to use paid search.
• 82% of ad clicks for advertisers ranking in organic positions 2 to 4 are incremental
• 96% of the ad clicks for advertisers ranking in organic position 5 or greater are incremental

Google does call it out specifically but do concede that while statistically there are 50% incremental clicks – the rate of incremental clicks varies by advertiser and I will also add that it is the context (query type or buy cycle) and type (branded or non branded) of keyword plays an important part in which is clicked.

My goal is make advertisers aware of the 50% incremental lift in clicks but more importantly ensure advertisers work with the SEO team to ensure that they do have a corresponding organic ranking.  Our research shows that few advertisers even know where they rank in relation to their paid terms.  What we want to clearly understand is how and when can an organic listing be a substitute for the paid ad?  That is the work we are doing now to test different situations like branded and non branded as well as phases of the buy cycle.

You can read my previous article on that attempts to answer the question “Should you buy your Brand Terms when you Rank #1?” where we look at a very specific case where a company was over paying by $24,000 a month for their brand name.

The Cost of Not Ranking

We already had a “Cost of Not Ranking Model” in our tool based on the Excel file that I write about in this post from 2010 on “The Cost of Not Ranking Organically” on my personal blog.  Based on this research I will update the logic in our tool to show the incremental cost.  Again, it should never be a PPC vs. Organic but a Paid + Organic and once we have the alignment then we can work on the messages to make sure they are collaborative.

What is your situation?

How many keywords do you have in your paid campaign that do or don’t have an organic performance.  As Google noted, without organic listings your paying for 100% of the clicks for people interested in your products and services.   If you don’t know what your situation is you are a perfect candidate for our Keyword Management Suite or new Search Performance Analysis Solution.

One of the biggest issues I keep encountering as I demo our Keyword Management Tool is the aversion by many PPC managers to Co-Optimization. Yesterday I posted this new post on “Realizing Paid and Organic Search Strategies” and suggested that there are specific cost reductions that can be had when you can transfer expensive PPC clicks into your organic pages rather than paying for them in via PPC.

And today I was looking at two new pilot projects for large tech companies and found they they are prime for Co-Optimization. Co-Optimization is simply activities that maximize the collaborative performance of paid and organic search. It is not paid vs. organic but how do we combine them for even greater results. For all of the naysayers to this concept most are shocked when they realize they don’t even know what is happening when they have top ranking organic with top paid search listings. That is your first step – understand what happens in this situation.

How do your Expensive PPC Keyword Perform in SEO?

One of my top recommendations from my Advanced Keyword Modeling session at SES New York was to go back and take your top 20 most expensive keywords by Cost Per Click and just see how you are ranking and performing for those words.

I have had a number a people tell me that they have done this and were shocked by what they found.

Of the 23 people who have done this analysis only 1 had more than half of their keywords ranking on page 1 for their most expensive keywords. This clearly shows the communications disconnect between paid and organic search.

I have always used simple math to try to get people to understand this. A typical search results page for a popular phrase has 10 organic listings and 10 paid listings. IF you only have paid listing then the minimum potential click rate is 5% (10 paid + 10 organic = 20 options for click – clicking 1 of 20 options is 5%. Meaning if you also have an organic you have a 2 in 20 chance of being clicked so 10%.

Here are some of the responses I have received for why people don’t do this analysis:

“It just seems to hard and I don’t have enough time as it is”

“Research shows that there is an 89% increase in clicks when you add paid search to your program but we don’t know if we get that level of clicks”

“Our Paid Listings are for Conversion and Organic are for awareness”

“We can’t do this type of analysis since our paid and organic agencies won’t work together”

“We can’t share the paid data with the organic agency since it is our IP and we don’t want them to reverse engineer our proprietary bid strategies”

“We don’t have a conversion option on our organic pages so we need paid to get people to convert”

“$35 and $50 CPC’s are acceptable to us since we can’t change our organic pages to add conversion options”

Now… that we have the excuses out of the way – lets look at reality. The following are two real examples from large companies that gave these types of excuses only to be shocked when they actually saw the data

In this fist case, out of their top 20 keywords by CPC cost, with costs ranging from $43.76 to $27.79 (yes that is per click) and only 1 of the words is in the top 5 positions 4 of 20 on the first page. What was interesting is that some of these words were not on the SEO teams priority list. A second thing to note, is that many of these words don’t have a lot of search demand and yet they are managed on broad match.

While I thought this first case was bad was even more surprised when we loaded the data from another company in a similar industry. They were even worse if that is possible:

Their keywords ranged from a high of $123.96 to $46.81 for a single CLICK. Wow…. I don’t even think the ambulance chasers spend that much to rope people into class action lawsuits. Only 2 of the 20 have a first page listing with 15 of the words not even being in the top 50 positions.

These both are examples of a key problem when paid and organic are not looked at holistically. Again, I am not saying paid is bad but lets go for the 1+1 = 3 multiplier and at least work to get some organic representation.

Co-Op Baby Steps

Start small with just the simple understanding of what is happening for keywords. Do you have paid and organic at the same time and where don’t we have them both. When you do are the collaborating or cannibalizing each other?

For a number of years I have been evangelizing the benefits of integrating your paid and organic activities.   It does not matter if it is via a single agency or multiple agencies as long as you do have a unified strategy.  The following are 8 key reasons why you should have paid and organic in sync.

1.  Search Results ShelfSpace

This one seems pretty obvious but rarely listed as  reason for jointly managing the search programs.   Forget any sort of paid vs. organic but lets get them both positioned well and take of two of the potential 20 spots on the SERPS shelfspace.  This double listing gives additional branding, double the message and often sways searchers in clicking one or the other listing.  Add in social media listings and you can have a significant part of the SERPs covered.

2. Insights from Unified Reporting

By integrating the results of both paid and natural search in a single report helps you understand the relationship between the two better.  The joint view into the clicks can help understand the needs and interests of the searcher.  Which listing they click can also allow you to determine if there is a synergistic or cannibalistic effect between the two listings.

3.  Cost Reductions

So far 100% of the pilots and clients we have worked with have not had all of their most expensive keywords by cost per clicked represented in the natural search results.  This results in all of the clicks being “rented” and incurring a cost with no chance of getting them for free.   When these are your most expensive keywords even a 10% shift of clicks into the organic results for these words can save significant budget to target words with less budget allocation.

4. Program Management Efficiency

Quite simply, if the client has their entire search program under a single manager or agency they can ensure collaboration and uniform execution.  This can be with a single agency or multiple agencies but under a single owner.  This saves a lot of time and money in terms of communication, project management, results reporting, account management and much more since all this is done at one time.  Many people have indicated they like our application since it allows for rolled up data without the problems of agency IP concerns and extra costs of aggregating it.

5. Landing Page Strategies

Unfortunately, too much effort is applied to paid search landing pages and little applied to organic landing pages.  Too often the SEO team is overly focused on rank and not as focused on conversion of their organic pages.  I actually had a company tell me recently that their organic pages are just for awareness and not for any conversion.  This is a huge mistake.  You can use the data from paid and organic conversions to impact the performance of the other.  A key feature of Opportunity Models is to identify landing pages that are outperforming their counter parts for review and best practices reapplied to the other.    By combining the best of the two approaches, you should end up with the perfect landing page – one that ranks highly, improves your quality score AND most importantly converts.

6. Algorithm Shift Risk Mitigation

With all of the changes lately in the algorithms paid search is a great way to hedge against a massive drop in performance.   By monitoring a drop in organic performance in high-value keywords the PPC team can immediately fill the gap until the SEO is adjusted to regain the original performance.

7. Relevance Cannibalization

The effect of owning PPC terms where natural results already rank highly differs completely according to the brand, site, product, ranking position, competition and many other factors. When paid and natural are in the same place, these effects can be understood and accounted for.    We are seeing some interesting results interaction with different offers based on searcher intent as to which listing the searcher clicks.  Paid ads tend to be offer related and organic listings are awareness related.  By reviewing which the searcher clicks and the objective of each listing/page we can better understand the interests of the searcher.   A big challenge for large companies is the organic listing is pretty consistent yet the paid listings may be spread across multiple offers from different business units.  This may cause confusion for the searcher.

8. Misspelled Keywords

Often, the organization is focused on ranking well for high-demand keywords and get the branded variations by default.  Since it is rare that you will have misspellings on the site unless they are really close to the brand name you may not rank for them.   For one recent client, there were nearly 12,000 brand name misspellings that were driving traffic to the site.  Many of these were captured very inexpensively via paid search.

There are a few others best practices and reasons for integrating paid and natural search but for now lets focus on these 8.   All of these are key attributes in our new Opportunity Miner feature.  What do you think? How do you view the relationship between paid and natural search?

Large companies do something that small companies often can’t do—they specialize. But those specialties can sometimes work against them, because they attack problems in such separate ways that they never find the advantages that accrue from working together. SEO and PPC are often handled by different teams in large enterprises, which makes sense in some ways. One area where it makes little sense, however, is keyword research.

You might have many reasons for having separate teams for SEO and PPC, but this silo approach has implications for keyword research that should trouble you. Although it is true that keywords that work for paid search might not work for organic, and vice versa, a large piece of keyword research has nothing to do with paid and organic—it is about market segmentation and about searcher intent.

Some of you might be objecting at this point. Yes, it’s true that there is a limit to the number of keywords that you can optimize with organic search. At a certain point, you can’t keep adding pages to the navigation of your Web site. And you need to make decisions about which synonyms you want to emphasize. And, yes, you need to make hard decisions about which long tail keywords you need to leave behind in SEO. But all of the rest of your keywords can be managed jointly by the paid and organic search teams.

The most advanced search marketing programs recognize that keyword research should be a joint effort between the SEO and PPC teams. Most of those keywords should be shared between both teams, with an additional set of deeper keywords that should be part of paid search campaigns only. Unfortunately, few companies do it that way.  Our own survey of Keyword Management best practices shows only one percent of companies have looked at paid and organic search together, which is exactly what you must do for keyword research.

While specialization is needed, especially in large companies, too much specialization in keyword research is counterproductive. In search, keywords are your market segments, and your prospects and customers signal what they are interested in based on the words that they use.

Take an example of a keyword that converts very well in your paid campaign but badly for organic search. With a silo approach, your paid team will pour resources into that word while your organic team might conclude that it should not be focused on that keyword—which likely be completely wrong. Also, you could be spending a lot of money on clicks for paid search since they are important but not even be on the list for the SEO team.

The searchers using that keyword are the same people for your paid and organic campaign. If the paid search ad works, it is worth some time to explore how to improve the organic performance to achieve the magical 1 + 1 = 3 that all the research shows is possible.

When your PPC and SEO teams collaborate on keyword research, you uncover these opportunities far more often than when they are left to their own devices. There are certainly places for specialization in digital marketing, but search keyword research isn’t one of them.

We have taken a lot of the thinking and Excel wizardry off the table by integrating these common questions into our Keyword Opportunity Models.  If you are ready for more information or a demo contact us to get started.

The above is the headline of a nice shinny object that Google is dangling in front of marketers. One that is being used out of context and I am sure has resulted in significant money being pissed away in paid search. Now, I am not against paid search in any way – I think it is a great tool and works even better when it is in collaboration with organic listings. That is what I advocate – co-optimization. How do we make them work better together.

Over the past few weeks I have heard that 89% quote in four countries, at every conference and at least 20 times alone at SMX in New York. So where did it is come from?

This is essentially the findings of a research study released recently by Google employees titled “Incremental Clicks Impact of Search Advertising”  that said the following:

A meta-analysis of several hundred of these studies reveals that over 89% of the ads clicks are incremental, in the sense that the visits to the advertiser’s site would not have occurred without the ad campaigns.

Immediately this was translated by the market place as the following headlines in articles and blogs with the first being my favorite “doom and gloom” heading:

• “Danger – STOP Paid Search Advertising & Lose Up To 89% Of Your Web Traffic!”
• “89% lift when Paid Search is added to Organic Search”
• “Studies show search ads drive 89% incremental traffic”
• “Paid Search delivers 89% more traffic than organic SEO alone”
• “Google Study: 89% Uplift from Paid Search Clicks”
• “Google: Search Ads Drive 89% Incremental Traffic”
• “Google Research Shows Paid Search Ads Get 89% More Traffic Than Organic Search Results”

Google went on to create an “idiot proof” Paid Search is Great video that showed that in some cases 98% of the traffic

For those of you that actually read Google’s study other than the half-assed paraphaseing blogs you might have noticed the “your mileage may vary clause” in the last paragraph of Section 3:

A low value for IAC may occur when the paid and organic results are both similar and in close proximity to each other on the search results page. This increases the likelihood of a user clicking on an organic result as opposed to a paid result.

Close proximity occurs when the ranking of the organic result is high, placing it near the paid results. Organic results triggered by branded search terms tend to have a higher ranking on average and this may lead to a low IAC value.

Matt Van Wagner scared me for a moment with the headline  in  a recent Search Engine Land article Google Study: PPC Ads Do NOT Cannibalize Your Organic Traffic  fortunately Matt was not another Google fanboy and strongly suggested that  people actually test the data.  As I mention on my personal blog, New Venture Announcement – Voice of Consumer Data Management System I have done a few surveys and found only a few people actually combining the data and doing anything with it.

Brad Geddes has been talking about this the longest and a recent post on his blog goes into the mechanics of doing the testing of paid vs. free clicks.  I had already added this specific testing into my tool and it starts to show some very interesting results.

One of the biggest reasons I found as to why people don’t do it is it is too hard to do for most.  In Brad’s post he simplifies it but what if you have a lot of keywords?  This is one of the key elements that I have built into my tool. I have only found a few companies that even know if they are ranking for key paid listing.

Below is a screen capture from my tool that shows that for the 20 most expensive words by Cost Per Click they did NOT rank on even on the first page. In this case, yes, Google’s study holds true – if you have no exposure in organic search then the only exposure you will get is from paid ads.

In this case they are paying $10.00 or more per click, their highest CPC and they are not ranking well.  We can’t even get to a collaboration scenario until we have the organic rankings.   This company was not aware of this problem since they were not looking at the data collectively.  Immediately after learning about this they went to work optimizing the pages to try to get these to rank better.  In a few cases, there were not important and they reduced their average CPC.    This is the opposite reason people use PPC – to make up for the shortcoming of their organic performance. Maybe they can redo the study and show what happens when they have organic rankings.

To help companies understand once they have an organic ranking and a paid search rankings what is happening.  I have built into the application a simple ROI calculator. For your PPC Loyalist and Co-Optimization Haters – yes there is no message context or any other variables other than the fact this word had a negative ROI.

In the example below, we have a keyword that everyone thought was performing acceptably well.  When we actually do some analysis we see that it has a negative ROI and is loosing the company $11,825 dollars in the current month the the organic term was generating $6 million.

To be fair, we can look at a positive ROI example where the paid and the organic have generated a positive ROI.

In this case organic still does out perform PPC but PPC has a positive ROI.  In further tests when this PPC ad was day parted to appear less frequently, Organic did not pick up the additional clicks.  This showed us that in this specific case, paid and organic were collaborative and having paid search resulted in incremental visits and clicks.

There are a few things you need to do and consider when looking at the analysis.

You don’t have to do all of your keywords.  You should decide if they are the brand name, branded product names or if they are general category or specific non-branded words you are looking at.

The tests you want to do are the following:

What happens when we have paid only?  This is a good test to do before you optimize content and do not have an organic position.

What happens when we have organic only? You can day part of pause the paid search for a period.  Most of the times a few days or a week is sufficient.

What happens when we have paid and organic? Once you rank well you can start the comparison.  This will tell you what is happening when they are both together.

We are NOT trying to eliminate paid search for all words.  Only those words there there is not an incremental lift if clicks.  If we turn off paid search and all or most of the clicks and conversions that went to paid increase the organic clicks and conversions then paid is NOT complimentary but cannibalistic.  If the clicks and conversions do not increase we can assume that they are collaborative and simply un-pause the paid ads until you can do a message test.

The point of this is just test it and see what is happening.  If you want to better understand our analysis tools send us an email and we would be glad to give you a demo.