Is PPC More Important to a New Site Than SEO?

In a recent article, we looked at a debate over what is better between search engine optimization and pay-per-click. Of course both should be used typically, but on a recent panel at SES Chicago, participants were asked to pick a side to highlight the benefits of each compared to the other. It made for some pretty interesting conversation.

Both SEO and PPC are important, but do you think one carries more weight than the other? Share your thoughts here.

That conversation extended into our comments. The general consensus seems to be that you should use both when possible, but that SEO is better for the long term, and PPC is better for quick results. These notions were backed up by both Michael Gray and Christine Churchill, who were on opposing sides of the debate at SES.

Gray and Churchill both shared their thoughts in more detail in two separate interviews for WebProNews. Gray noted that Google is making changes that could have some effect on the success of organic rankings. One of these changes is the introduction of personalized search to all Gooogle users. You no longer have to be signed in for Google to personalize your results, and that means it is much more important to get that first click from a user. Gray talks about this and the other change, being Google’s banning of AdWords advertisers with what he thinks is not the best communication.

Churchill elaborated on the usefulness of PPC to people who are just establishing themselves on the web. The reality is that SEO takes time, and while it is of great importance and provides long-term benefits, it is very hard to be competitive right out of the box.

When you have a brand new domain name, a new site, and no links, you’re probably going to have a hard time jumping up in the rankings for any competitive keywords. PPC lets you do it and start getting your ROI quickly. She also talked a little bit about flexibility vs. control between SEO and PPC.

Not everyone agrees that PPC should be used for a brand new site. One reader commented on our previous article:

SEO is an absolute must when dealing with new web sites. None of the search engines are going to rank you very high in the organic searches if you are not meeting their criteria. And…the Organic search results are 24 hours per day ads. Not so with PPC, unless you are dealing with an unlimited budget.

PPC should be used after SEO to target special sales, or services. It is a great way to help searchers locate your products when they are on sale, or your services when a special price can be obtained.

One thing to keep in mind, however, as Gray touched upon, and some other readers suggested, PPC can be used up front to help you determine the directions to take your SEO efforts in. You can use PPC quickly to determine what keywords convert better, and use that to your advantage in your optimization practices.

Do you think paid search is becoming increasingly important to marketing? Share your thoughts here.

Related Articles:

> Does an Organic Search Presence Help Paid Result Performance?

> Can You “Rank” in Google if Everyone Has Different Search Results?

> Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

Online Ad Revenues On the Rise

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers released their latest Internet advertising numbers for the third quarter. According to the organizations, Internet advertising revenues reached nearly $5.5 billion for the quarter. That is an increase of 1.7% from the second quarter.

The numbers are still significantly down from the same period last year, but any increase is a good sign of things to come. There has been a 5.4% decline from last year.

“The Internet has transformed the consumer experience of media, providing marketers with unprecedented opportunities to engage with their customers,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “The advertising sector overall has been hard hit by the economy, but digital media has been a bright spot within the larger economic downturn as it is capturing an ever-increasing piece of marketers’ advertising spend.”

“While all segments of the media industry have experienced declines, online advertising remains resilient and is once again showing signs of growth,” said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

The information from the IAB/PWC is considered the most accurate measurement of interactive ad revenue, the IAB says, because its compiled directly from info supplied by companies selling advertising on the web. The IAB releases a full report twice a year to reflect half-year periods. It will be interesting to see how the second half of the year plays out in its entirety.

Related Articles:

> Online Advertising is Having a Big Year

> Online Ad Revenue Tops $10 Billion

> IAB Releases Ad Unit Guidelines Update

Borrowing From PPC

Search marketers know that if the title of the ad matches the searchers keyword query, they stand a good chance of getting the click.

This mirroring strategy works for obvious reasons. The visitor already has a psychological attachment to the phrase – after all, they typed it in!

Making Sure You Get The Click

A lot of SEO strategy talks about how to achieve rankings.

Whilst important, the SEO pro knows ranking is only half the battle won. While it’s true to say most searchers will click on the top results in preference to results lower down the page, they will also scan across the various titles displayed. All links on the results page compete for the click, and a compelling title may win out over a higher ranking position.

If the user doesn’t find what they want when they scan, they will likely rephrase their search and try again. So the way you phrase your title tag is not only important in terms of helping attain a ranking position, it is also important that it stands out.

But how do you know which phrases will work?

What You Can Learn From Adwords

Actually, the answer is right in front of us.

Google rewards top performing Adwords advertisers with the top positions i.e. the advertisers who are achieving the highest click thru rates. The copy and titles you see in the top PPC ads are proven.

If the advertiser has been in that position for some time, it is highly likely s/he is making a positive return on their spend. Their approach is, therefore, working.

That’s a lot of valuable information.

Look at the copy the advertisers are using. What words are they using in the title? Try emulating their approach. Emulating their description is a little more tricky as Google uses snippets. However, if the phrase the user is searching for also appears in your meta description tag, Google will tend to display the tag snippet instead.

Of course, SEO’s have to balance ranking considerations, too, but if you can get these factors aligned, you’re in a great position. Given that most people – estimated to be around 70-80% – will click on a natural search result, as opposed to an advertisment, if you can occupy the top few spots using a similar phrasing as the PPC advertiser, you are more likely to get the click.

Don’t stop there.

Check out the landing pages used by the top advertisers. If they are occupying top positions over a long period of time, they are either carelessly blowing through a lot of cash, or, more likely, their PPC campaign is making money.

Whilst it’s not advisable to copy exactly what they do – and it’s probably against the law – you can use their approach as a guide. How are they structuring their landing pages? Where are they placing their offer? What language are they using? What titles are they using? How is the copy structured?

Use a similar approach in your SEO campaign.

One thing to be careful of is to understand that SEO and PPC often have a different focus. PPC tends to be driven by ROI and other profit per visitor type metrics. Once a PPC advertiser pays for the click, they try to move the visitor to desired action quickly.

SEO, on the other hand, can afford to be less specific as there is little jeopardy in only appealing to a tiny fraction of visitors who click. SEO can afford to go wide and broad. Engagement and brand metrics come into play a bit more in SEO.

By The Way…..

Because SEO can afford to go broad, and has the added task of ranking for keywords based on the content of your page, Google’s Wonder Wheel is a great tool for finding related phrases which you can integrate into your copy.

If you haven’t heard of the Wonder Wheel, here is how to find it:

1. Conduct a search. Click on “Show Options…”

2. Click on “Wonder Wheel” (shown on the list at the right hand side)

3. Click on a few of the spokes….

4. Integrate any relevant, related keyword terms in your copy….

I use this tool a lot as it’s great for picking up on long tail searches that still relate to your chosen keyword term. If any of these terms prove worthwhile, you can then develop separate pages to target them specifically.

PPC Has Always Been the Wrong Term

It may seem like a small point, but “pay-per-click” was the nickname given to paid search advertising back when it started out, but it only describes a pricing method, not the nature of the media or what we seek from it. (In the proto-days of that same technology, “paid keywords” or “buying keywords” was another way of describing it.)

I was reminded of this whole mental muddle today reading the headline from an email solicitation, something about “getting more PPC without using Google”.

But that whole line is kind of old hat. It’s the come-on that opportunistic, non-search-based ad platform companies used to sell their crummy, remnant, and sometimes fraudulent contextual text ad inventory. Sometimes it couldn’t have even been described that neatly. It was traffic, and you paid for the clicks, and potentially you used keywords to guide the system towards certain publishers, but that was about it. You might as well have paid the effective CPM rate, as bid on clicks. Didn’t matter.

That’s why I always advocated paid search as the term of choice for people who really wanted to go after clicks from ordered results placed near search engine results, but it scarcely matters what I advocate! — people will use all kinds of terms.

SEM is another term that arose. Agenda-setters in the business tried to remind everyone that paid search (or “PPC”) is one sub-type of SEM (search engine marketing), and SEO (on the “organic side”) is another sub-type. But the fight to make SEM exclusively the global term, and not to be used as synonymous with PPC or paid search, was lost. SEM is often used interchangeably with PPC or paid search.

No matter. With all of these nomenclature battles being unwinnable, we should turn our attention to the whole reason “PPC” was so attractive as a pricing mechanism. It’s because it represented a happy medium between CPM (paying only for impressions — “cost per thousand impressions”) and CPA (”cost per acquisition” — paying for lead conversions or even revenue-generating sales conversions).

You can draw up equivalents across these mechanisms, and measure or express them all for your keyword (paid search) campaigns. So the click isn’t anything special. It can be expressed in its CPM equivalent and you can and should also be measuring ROI, ROAS, or CPA.

Indeed, according to some scholars [see "Greedy Bidding Strategies for Keyword Auctions"], the most rational strategy for bidding in a digital media auction would take you straight to CPA or revenue if that was possible. If you could bid directly on the customer acquisition or revenue, you would. (And in fact, that’s what some forms of bid management automation attempt to do, at one or two removes. And it’s what manual campaign management also attempts to do, painstakingly.)

But step back further. Are search, keywords, or clicks inherently special? Why the drive to distinguish them from other forms of media? Is it for what they are, or what they represent?

It has to be the latter. They represent potentially the most extreme (and measurable) form of granular targeting and flexible bidding, of a certain type. This is reflected in the sky-high effective CPM rates for some keywords.

But that means that all of this distinguishing one type or another is done mostly for economic or practical reasons.

Search and keywords (and clicks) fall into the general category of auction-based digital media. Whether we’re bidding on clicks, acquisitions, impressions, or other, the universe of digital media is amenable to similar tests. From a rational bidder’s standpoint, there should be no inherently good or bad media, nothing inherently “creepy” or “wrong,” nothing inherently above reproach either.

That’s mostly true. It’s not entirely true. (Dropping ad-laden anvils on prospects’ vehicles is interruption media, and some companies would pay for it, but it’s stupid and illegal.) But isn’t it a good starting point for analysis?

“PPC” doesn’t matter per se. So pitches like “now you can get ‘PPC’ from other channels than Google” shouldn’t have any special weight. You shouldn’t be looking too hard for that inventory if your economic criteria show it’s not going to pay off for you. Nor should you have been ignoring it all along just because you thought that “PPC” or “Google” were special for some inherent reason.

Badly-Managed AdWords Accounts — Worse for You Than for Google

With a few high-profile exceptions, water always flows downhill. If you want to calculate which way a river flows, all you need to calculate is which end is on the high ground, and which on the low ground, and there’s your answer.

Similarly, the flow of advertiser dollars from other channels into paid search platforms like Google AdWords has been predictable over time because of one factor: measurable performance when compared head-to-head with other channels.

In accounts where that condition hasn’t been satisfied, companies don’t increase budgets for paid search. They don’t always shut off their accounts, though. So the end result is an account that sort of wanders along, hoping for the best, performing far below potential.

At different points in time, this state of affairs might benefit Google a lot or a little. The times when it benefited Google less were when their relevancy incentives (mostly CTR-based) were set in a dogmatic sort of way. If your account was really lazily and loosely targeted, eventually stuff would get “disabled” or “deactivated.” That would kill volume for you, but you were probably doing horribly anyway, so it was actually a savings. Google, meanwhile, didn’t get to exact as much of an “idiot tax” out of you. So they had to rely on other mechanisms, such as ego bidding or a hot economy, to further their profitability.

It’s not quite like that now. Google has a sophisticated set of mechanisms for selectively allowing you to screw things up. They may not particularly like your fuzzily-targeted ads, but they’re willing to show a certain percentage of them in certain verticals as long as your bids are sky high.

The end result of a low-volume, fuzzily-managed campaign, of course, is a poor ROI for the advertiser. But here’s the curious thing. If the company has invested something in people and plans to run ads in this channel, they don’t shut it off completely. They treat it like their other underperforming channels: shrug their shoulders, hope it gets better, turn the budget down a bit so it doesn’t cause significant harm. From day one, I’ve suggested that this isn’t a true savings, but a squandering of potential. “All in” or “all out” should be the advertiser’s mentality. It is difficult, but not impossible, to optimize your campaign so that increasing the budget is feasible. If that’s not happening, why run it at all?

The fuzzy, meandering, high-CPC-low-return campaign is not a negative scenario – short term – for Google’s revenues and profits. These inefficient campaigns collectively spend heavily, smoothing out the ups and downs of the keyword auctions where advertisers are managing more tightly to customer responses. That’s one of the reasons why, in the near term, Google’s revenues will continue to rise gradually or at least be flat, avoiding the severe hits that other advertising media have taken during the recession. Look for proof of this with Google’s upcoming Q3 2009 earnings release on October 15.

At Page Zero Media we inherit such accounts fairly often. There are two common targeting errors that companies make in the early days of planning AdWords campaigns:

(1) Loose and broad targeting, particularly of the type that addresses a mass market when you’re going for a niche market. A company will say to themselves (perhaps having watched Conrad Hilton in Mad Men saying he wants to put a Hilton “on the moon”): “We want someday to be the biggest and best insurance company in the world!” But for now, they’re just focusing on being top-of-mind in car insurance for high-risk drivers, especially those under the age of 25. Somewhere along the line, possibly in a text message from a golf banquet with impressive friends, the CEO forced the associate to the assistant marketing director to try broad matches for the words “insurance” and “car insurance” in the campaign. They’re still eking along, in select markets, costing the company $18 per click whenever they are clicked, eating into the allotted budget for all the good stuff.

(2) Insider thinking. Companies get into their own jargon, right down into the regulatory mumbo-jumbo from arguments in Congress about all the players in their industry. The next thing you know, there are ad groups containing all the jargon about high-risk drivers — jargon that’s only ever come up in those Congress debates, in board meetings, and expensive consulting reports. People click on the ads occasionally, but they’re inevitably just looking for information, not a car insurance vendor.

As these cardinal errors continue to eat away at the overall budget, the ROI for the whole campaign looks poor. The budget stays where it is. And the company concludes that the channel doesn’t match the hype.

–

I got a note from a colleague who has spent years building out paid search campaigns that have formerly failed for the above reasons. Here’s his tale of woe – the industry sector changed to protect the innocent:

If I can lend a “yes this is the way it works” rule to any PPC work for [insurance] that we should inscribe into our core being: Seth Godin needs to be read by every one of the people who do campaigns for them. Most of the time (probably CEO driven) they focus on the whole “getting their name out there” thing. Each new one I see is a broad, undisciplined mess. They constantly target information seekers with words like “best insurance” or “top insurance companies”. The people who click those 1) Already have a vendor and are satisfied with them; and 2) Are simply looking for ideas; 3) In no way are targeted properly. The kicker is that those words are $5, $6, or $10 a click. They might as well spend that money on a TV commercial because that is akin to interruption marketing, PPC style. You can get fooled as well, because if someone has an article on top insurance companies on their site, like our client does, people will read it and stay. The bounce numbers tend to be pretty low, so if you are looking at that only, you get a false sense that the words are working. But when you look at signups, they are very close to 0%. I am not sure many of them do it, but content and blogs should be king for these sites, for those words; and they should spend that money on writing content. If you have and write articles based on all the key buzzwords like “car insurance comparison”, you should get bang for that on organic search for $0. Example: “Best [(competing but ultimately very different type of) insurance]” and so on. Our new client spent $22,000 on those words via adwords. They got one person to sign up for an account. ONE! [Edit: we did more checking, and it might have been two.] Conversely: Targeted to their selling proposition of [doing more research on individuals in high risk insurance categories to offer them a break on rates if possible], those words [all having to do with insurance rates, unfair insurance rates, demographics of insurance rates] and so on, with a good ad, had $4000 spent and they got 20 people to sign up. OK, long story short: For financial services, not unlike others but especially for them, being targeted to exactly what you do if you are spending $4 a click or more is so vital it is not funny.

–

Google has worked themselves into a situation where the “idiot tax” helps Google’s bottom line. So although they’d prefer it if most advertisers improved the relevancy of their advertising, the current system is built to hedge against idiocy. That being said, then, Google doesn’t stand to gain a whole lot as advertisers become savvier and more efficient. In the past, the genius of the ad platform meant that Google’s earnings and profits raced ahead faster than expected. During the recession, they’re outperforming everyone else. But as the economy recovers, this current efficiency also means that you may not see Google grow as fast as you expect. They’ve wrung a lot of cash out of relatively wasteful advertising. Less wasteful practices will definitely help individual advertisers… a lot. They won’t help Google nearly as much.

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