Just before Christmas, Stuart Small from Google revealed the shocking fact that 80% of the clicks on Google’s SERPs are on natural search results, and only 20% are on PPC adverts. Should us Adwords folk be concerned? Are we really all competing for 20% of the traffic? Well, no, actually. There’s a fundamental flaw in the logic here… I’ve got no reason to doubt the veracity of this ratio – in fact, it doesn’t surprise me in the least. But I suspect it’s a little misleading. What are the biggest search terms on Google? I suspect Facebook, Youtube and Myspace and Wikipedia are probably quite high up there. And what about “Britney Spears”, “David Beckham” or “Chris Benoit”? And believe it or not, a lot of people actually search on Google for information. If you want to know the average rainfall in the Amazon Basin, you’re not likely to click on a PPC advert, even if some appear! Most big websites ask Google to stop other people from bidding on their names. And since they will always appear top of the natural listings for their own name, they tend not to run a PPC advert themselves. The same is true with Britney, David, Chris et al. Even if there are PPC adverts running for these people, they aren’t going to be getting many clicks. People searching for celebrities by name are looking for pictures, gossip, blogs, forums and the like – not the kind of things you are going to find in the PPC adverts, in general. For the same reason, people searching for information. In the UK (and I assume, in most other places as well), a search for “emmental cheese”, “eagle lifespan”, “former members of The Who” and “average rainfall in the Amazon Basin” all return natural results, but no PPC results. Who would possibly be advertising on these terms? The clickthrough rate would be terrible for any business bidding here, so the cost per click would be high, and the traffic would be of poor quality. Realistically, what percentage of searches would any serious business actually be bidding on for PPC? If it’s only 50%, and the other 50% of searches generate only natural results, then on the other 50% of searches, the ratio of clicks must be 60:40 in favour of natural search result clicks. Without knowing this, then you really can’t tell what percentage of the pie you’re competing for. It will vary from category to category, and even from keyword to keyword. This information was put forward by someone advocating SEO ahead of PPC in a debate – it’s certainly eye-catching, but he deliberately used a number to sway people to his argument. Google know what the true percentage of the pie the PPC adverts are fighting over – they have to in order to adjust your minimum bids based on your clickthrough rate. Typically, well-written adverts can easily pick up 5% of the traffic in the top few positions, down to 1%-2% in the lower positions. Overall, these add up to well over 20% – I would suspect that an average figure for searches for actual products or services, 35% – 40% may be a more realistic figure. What do you think? On the searches that advertisers pay to advertise on, what percentage of the traffic hit the PPC adverts? And can businesses really afford to ignore these people, and focus solely on SEO?
I think you are right there Steve, most of the top searches nowadays are ‘navigational searches’ as explained during the various SMX’s. People search for domain names a lot, and people searching for google.com in google is no exception. (!)
It would be interesting to have a look at the daily volume of searches in order to try and evaluate the exact amount of navigational searches taking place on search engines in orer to understand the 80:20 ratio better.
Hmm… Can’t see them letting that sort of information slip in a debate…