Sociolatte

Study: Search Ads Drive 89% Incremental Traffic

Google has just released some interesting data in relation to search ads vs organic clicks. The basis of the study was to determine if in the absence of search ads would organic clicks make up for the loss, basically every site and blog owner is worried about traffic and there are two ways to generate traffic one is by organic results when your website or blog is found via the search engine route or paid traffic (Advertising). with paid traffic what happens is that ads can be placed through any of the leading search engines or now social media sites and users find these ads click it and land on your site. CTR is what it's called (Click through rate). Advertisers therefore wonder if  search ads cannibalize their organic traffic. What this actually means is if an advertiser decides not to pay for search ads and depend only on organic results. Anyway their websites might already by popular on search engine giants like Google. Would paying for ads and therefore traffic actually be a hindrance  Would not placing ads actually make up for the loss.

The engineers at Google decided to do a study called 'Search Ads Pause Studies' to determine what happens when advertisers decide to stop using search ads. The study was done along these lines.
1. Observe organic click volumes in the absence of search ads
2. Statistical model built to predict click volume for given levels of ad spend against organic impression volume.
3. Determine the volume of paid clicks not made up for by organic clicks.


The results found was very surprising, a full 89% of paid clicks were not made up for my organic clicks. This is a clear indication that paying for traffic is something some advertisers, webmasters and site owners will not be able to live without if that is what they depend on to drive traffic to their sites. In fact from the study it can be seen that it is a healthy and quick way and money well spent. As it is surely yields results and is not a waste in any way because it very definitely drives traffic through clicks and interest. You can read the Google blog post about the same here or find the complete study here. So webmasters and site and blog users using PPC ads and other search ads can be confident that it is money and investment well spent. Please share your thoughts using the comments section below. 

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