Friday, July 18, 2003
Organic & Honest SEO
I was reading the Washington Post yesterday, a fine article by Leslie Walker titled "Web Giants Seek Fortune In Search Ads". I'm going to cut, copy, and paste in two amazing sentences from this article (the bold emphasis is my own).
“Researchers at ComScore Networks recently found that people who click on sponsored links in search results are twice as likely to buy something as people who click on unpaid search results after running the same query.
ComScore also found that paid search links had four times the click-through rate of unpaid search results for the same queries.�
I was surprised to read this, because in the past two weeks, I had talked to two business owners about advertising at Google. Maybe it's a Midwestern bias, but they had completely opposite beliefs than those of the ComScore people.
The first business manager said that he'd never click on the "ads to the right side", because he felt that those websites were going to charge more for their products and services that the people who showed up in the listings more "organically and honestly." (Note: I like that term "organic & honest" in regard to SEO. . .so Midwestern, it made me grin from ear to ear. I think I'm going to use it from now on. This is not to say that I think that paid Google inclusion is polluted & dishonest, though!)
Now, the second business owner said that he'd never even seen the ads, and let me tell you -- this guy searches at Google religiously. His sole focus is on the listings, not on the ads. I had to actually point at the ads with my finger to get him to recognize that they were even on the page.
Now, I appreciate the different viewpoints of these two successful businesspeople, and I also appreciate the ComScore research. I'll likely pass it along to both of them.
Further, ComScore came out with this research finding right after Google made AdSense available to just about anybody with a website and a pulse, as opposed to their previous policy of sites with millions of pageviews only. It seemed to me that Google wanted to sell more click-throughs to their advertisers, and they weren't getting enough on their search engine queries.
The ComScore research came just in time to repudiate some of my conceptions, as well as my own analysis of customer conversion rates. Given their findings, all my customers' stats should show that visitors who came to their sites through paid search engine advertising buying at twice the rate of the "organic & honest" visitors. But so far, the conversion rates seem to be about the same.
So, I'll keep track of this over the coming weeks by zealously monitoring my web logs. We're a little slow to catch on in the Midwest, it turns out. Maybe the 'twice as likely' results will hit here in the next few weeks.
As a matter of fact, I have a meeting in about an hour to discuss the very latest ComScore findings and Google ad strategies. . .gotta run! ¶ 7/18/2003 08:52:00 AM
I was reading the Washington Post yesterday, a fine article by Leslie Walker titled "Web Giants Seek Fortune In Search Ads". I'm going to cut, copy, and paste in two amazing sentences from this article (the bold emphasis is my own).
“Researchers at ComScore Networks recently found that people who click on sponsored links in search results are twice as likely to buy something as people who click on unpaid search results after running the same query.
ComScore also found that paid search links had four times the click-through rate of unpaid search results for the same queries.�
I was surprised to read this, because in the past two weeks, I had talked to two business owners about advertising at Google. Maybe it's a Midwestern bias, but they had completely opposite beliefs than those of the ComScore people.
The first business manager said that he'd never click on the "ads to the right side", because he felt that those websites were going to charge more for their products and services that the people who showed up in the listings more "organically and honestly." (Note: I like that term "organic & honest" in regard to SEO. . .so Midwestern, it made me grin from ear to ear. I think I'm going to use it from now on. This is not to say that I think that paid Google inclusion is polluted & dishonest, though!)
Now, the second business owner said that he'd never even seen the ads, and let me tell you -- this guy searches at Google religiously. His sole focus is on the listings, not on the ads. I had to actually point at the ads with my finger to get him to recognize that they were even on the page.
Now, I appreciate the different viewpoints of these two successful businesspeople, and I also appreciate the ComScore research. I'll likely pass it along to both of them.
Further, ComScore came out with this research finding right after Google made AdSense available to just about anybody with a website and a pulse, as opposed to their previous policy of sites with millions of pageviews only. It seemed to me that Google wanted to sell more click-throughs to their advertisers, and they weren't getting enough on their search engine queries.
The ComScore research came just in time to repudiate some of my conceptions, as well as my own analysis of customer conversion rates. Given their findings, all my customers' stats should show that visitors who came to their sites through paid search engine advertising buying at twice the rate of the "organic & honest" visitors. But so far, the conversion rates seem to be about the same.
So, I'll keep track of this over the coming weeks by zealously monitoring my web logs. We're a little slow to catch on in the Midwest, it turns out. Maybe the 'twice as likely' results will hit here in the next few weeks.
As a matter of fact, I have a meeting in about an hour to discuss the very latest ComScore findings and Google ad strategies. . .gotta run! ¶ 7/18/2003 08:52:00 AM
