Search Ads Pause

A meta-study of 400+ Search Ads Pause studies, shows what happens when advertisers pause their search ad campaigns. This video explains the methodology and walks through results that show paid serach traffic is incremental to organic search traffic.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• search ads
• paid search
• research
• incremental
• incrementality
• internal google research

[markpappas]

ok I this is misleading. Of course organic won't make up the difference when paid ads are turned off. Paid search has a limitless reach depending on your budget and keyword list. I could target hundreds of keywords to a single landing page using paid search but with organic that page might rank for 1, 2 terms tops.

[Latro12]

This is a bit misleading and oversimplified. Please Google, show all the data from the study instead of just a few datapoints with bright colors and arrows pointing up.

[crockheel]

Agreed with @latro12 it would be very useful to see the full dataset (though obviously not something Google would be able to release without all the participants' permission) but without knowing where in the organic results these select participants were ranking the data doesn't mean a whole lot.

[costinnt89]

this is what I'd like to call a Google Video Sales-letter.

[OopWeeSEO]

We usually pause adds for clients as they run out of stock. Then once they have stock again we would activate there ad again. So they are not looking for organic clicks.

[leigao84]

@Latro12 It's a meta-study where one just look at the many studies out there in the field already. Usually meta-studies only gives off a few high level conclusions.

[kohlfuerst]

What is true in my opinion: GoogleBot comes more often when you do run an AdWords campaign and this might influence your search results cause new content is indexed faster. The AdWordsBot data is also transferred to the Google organic datacenter. So this might influence a little bit. But both are strictly separated. I am sure that if "Search Ads Pause" would be true someone would already have sued them like with click fraud and all the other stuff.

[cgrantski]

I think what the study says is that most PPC advertisers are largely paying for terms where they don't already rank well organically. I would guess that, over the last five years, this is becoming more the rule as people realize that a top organic placement doesn't need to be supplemented by paid search - that the paid search funds are better spent on terms where they get no decent organic ranks. I don't see how this study shows anything about PPC-organic cannibalism.

[jimjim]

@markpappas I don't think it's misleading but you are correct that the advantage is that with paid you have a longer reach than organic.

I think Google did this study so that they'd have hard numbers to show skeptics, for whatever reason, that paid doesn't really compete with your own organic listings.

[avwebnet]

Ah, the necessary evil sometimes needed. If you are in a tight competitive market for the keywords/phrases, expect to work for it. John Gensburg at Reachlocal can identify that niche for you. Yeah, this is a plug because I know the guy personally and he knows what he is doing. One of the most creative marketing people I know.