Blog

“Why should I pay for Google ads if I already rank in the organic results?  Won’t the user just click on my organic link instead?”

We get this question all the time from clients.  In PPC, it can be really difficult to separate personal search habits from how everyone else searches, which can often be wildly different.  Our performance data has always shown that more leads can be picked up by utilizing both paid advertisements as well as organic rankings on Google, but this was difficult to translate to clients, as our data set was never quite large enough to prove significant.  Lucky for us, Google is very good at crunching large datasets, and they did just that to answer this exact question.

Recently, Google conducted a study titled "Search Ads Pause Study," in which it looked at over 400 accounts across four countries in which it looked to use statistical models to answer the simple question: Are ads necessary when organic presence is high?   Because of our previous experience we already knew the answer yes, but we had no idea it was to the extent that Google found.

Here is a fun video Google put together explaining the study and its results.

On average, 89% of paid traffic to an advertiser’s site is lost and not recovered by organic clicks.

Wait a minute… 89%?  That’s HUGE!

The issue is we all suffer from a personal bias in which we believe everyone searches the way we do.  We may have never clicked a Google ad in our lives, but the $92+ Billion Google made last year would argue that plenty of people click on those ads.  This is just another reminder of the importance of data and the need to base decisions not on our own personal beliefs, but on the hard data.