The Disconnect in Understanding PPC

Posted on: October 22, 2008 by Syzlak

Yesterday, Rand posted a rather short-sighted view on the discrepencies in SEO and PPC budgets. While, I understand his fundamental argument for increased SEO budgets, the post drew ire from myself and fellow PPC advocates. Through quick smattering of evidence, Rand showed that PPC is on the decline, everyone looks at organic listings all the time, and no one clicks on ads (paraphrasing here folks). So, aside from a simple disagreement on the purpose of PPC and the effectiveness of SEO, what am I so mad about?

To some of you this may be familiar:

This eye research has been shown countless times to illustrate the Golden Triangle of search – the red area in the top left of a SERP where users are most active, violently clicking away to their hearts’ desire on the first thing they see. Since you’re probably familiar with this research, you probably know that I used it in a post from December of 2007 about Google’s encroachment on this Golden Triangle. Shit, I’m not even the first to use it! In fact, if anybody clicked through on the link Rand gave for the pic, you would see that Inspired Impressions used it back in April of 2006 (over 2 years ago). 2 years in “search time” is an eternity. For reference, if you were to have a kid in 2000 and he were to grow up in “search time,” he’d be Robin Williams from Jack.

Here’s how SERPs look more often than not today…well at least as of December 2007 (I’ll admit when I took the screenshot)

See how our buddies at Google are putting ads into that Golden Triangle? Do you suppose that users might be clicking on those a bit more often than they did 2+ years ago? More importantly, did you see what the top listing was in the pic that Rand gave us?

Look’s like that’s a Sponsored Link, and it’s getting quite a few clicks too…

Wouldn’t it be great if current data was used to make claims of suspect? While I think that some of what Rand is arguing is prudent (SEO could use a bit more money and focus for many companies), I do not agree with either his methods or his implied conclusion (we didn’t get a conclusion out of Rand, so I don’t want to put words in his mouth).

The fact of the matter is, PPC can drive instant gratification (traffic), qualified visitors (through ad copy and keyword targets), motivated visitors (drop ‘em on a landing page…they’ve seen everything – they’ve seen it all), and it can do all of this for as many or as few pages as desired on as much or as little a budget available.

Market size is also a determining factor of PPC/SEO budget. When I worked in local search for a few years when it was first blossoming, I would never have suggested to the 100 plumbers in Atlanta that they could spend their budget on trying to beat each other, as well as the national giants, on organic listings. For some industries, it’s pretty easy to compete in the less competitive field of PPC with focused keywords than to try to tackle 8,000 competitors in organic. So, why not allocate $100 towards a PPC budget that will pay off, and do so quickly, as opposed to spending thousands on SEO – especially when thousands aren’t available?

I hate to call out my pal David Mihm, but I also had a problem with his comment:

Well, honestly, it all stems from Kate’s comment, but I was more irked by this one. Not to be a downer, but sometimes in a “down economy” (I call it a depression, but ok ;) ), some companies may have to go with the cheap & quick solution just to stay alive. A lot of times, that’s the small businesses. Small businesses need to be present, build their brands and get visitors “in the door” just to make it to the next step-especially in a “down economy.”

I know Mihm, I know his work, he’s damn good and any small business would be wise to pay for his SEO services. Hell, businesses of any size would be wise to spend money on SEO; but for a lot of them, it’s just not in the cards right now. Not everything comes down to SEO having a bad reputation, being misunderstood & misrepresented, complex or the rest of the excuses a lot of us use; sometimes, SEO is just not what a business needs when we’re trying to sell it.

Tags, ,     Filed Under: ppc, sem, seo

  • this is the most intelligent post concerning PPC, hell, concerning search marketing i've read in some time. you're spot on - it ISN'T always about the SEO-guy or gal; sometimes it boils down to budget and need at that moment as well as the ability to control the message.
  • Steph_Woods
    Great post!

    I'm a firm believer in both SEO and PPC marketing working together harmoniously. I recommend to my clients to do both if possible; however, I have no problem only running a PPC campaign if that's all they can afford to do at present. Monthly SEO updates and link building campaigns can be expensive for smaller clients with wee marketing budgets.

    If truth be told, I'm actually stoked when a client wants to do PPC because it's fun shit!
  • Dude, how come you thumbed down my comment and not Kate's! :D

    Here's my issue with your plumbers example. It's actually remarkably easy, even in a large market like Atlanta, to outrank the national players like Superpages, etc. All it takes is a little unique content and a few links. The reason is that very few individuals plumbers, except maybe Samuel J Wurzelbacher, have powerful websites themselves. The big boys are all hoping their site architecture is good enough to get a decent amount of link juice to the right pages.

    Not to mention the incredible opportunity for traffic from the 10-pack for unique mom-n-pop businesses.

    Now on PPC, they'll be spending forever against the big boys with big budgets, many of whom aren't even ranking on page 1 organically.

    I'm all for multiple strategies and looking at the ROI of all efforts. I think if the budget is there, clients should do everything. It depends on the size of the business you're talking about though. Do you have clients spending $25/mo. on PPC? I do. And it's working for them.

    But there are setup costs involved for my time, and in order to get the maximum benefit from their outlay, they'll need to run that campaign for a long time. The total ROI needs to consider set-up time for all this stuff, a point articulated really well by Dan Hobin at SMX Local this year.

    Some of them don't have the budget for that...in which case the same amount of time involved in setting up and optimizing their Google and Yahoo Local listings will actually be a better long-term strategy.
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