New SEO vs PPC Google Study: Websites Received 50% More Clicks When Both PPC And SEO Are Used

Achieving a top ranking on the Google organic results page seems to be the goal of every website. But have you ever wondered how paid search can affect the amount of traffic you receive?  Google’s research team have recently shed some light into the relationship between search and paid results, finding that in some cases websites experienced a whopping 89% drop in clicks.

“When we released the first paper, we had a lot of questions coming back, asking more more details around incrementality and under what situations can you expect different numbers?,” said David Chan, Google’s lead researcher. Here is a summary of the findings below.

Analysing this figure

Surely anyone ranking on the very top of the search results wouldn’t see an 89% drop in clicks if PPC wasn’t in the picture? Continue reading »

To bid or not to bid on your brand keywords

There has been widespread debate on whether you should bid on your own brand keywords and create brand name ad groups. By ‘brand’, I mean keywords and ad groups of your company name. Some agencies will advocate against it, arguing that it generates poor ROI and is often a waste of limited resources. But before you write it off, generally it is better to bid on your brand and here’s why.

Lack of organic results

If your website does not have a top position for your main keywords or is relatively new, your brand keywords will often bring up very few results on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is a good time to bid on your brand keywords because you cannot generate traffic to your website if your potential customers cannot find you! PPC enables your brand to gain automatic exposure on the search engines.
Continue reading »