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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Organic SEO or Pay Per Click (PPC)?

Recently, we had a customer inquire about a Google AdWords campaign.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is not in and of itself a bad decision. We have used Google AdWords as an effective means of delivering traffic to customer websites. But we need to make a key distinction:

  • PPC is interruption advertising.
  • Organic SEO is relationship marketing.

As advertising goes, PPC can be more cost-effective than more traditional forms of advertising, but it is better suited to B2C marketing than B2B, which is, of course, why we generally prefer organic SEO for our customers.

Issues that need to be considered:

Keyword Selection
Who chooses the keywords to be used? Here's where the Discovery process comes in. Keyword selection requires an understanding of both the vendor and the customer. Vendors tend to think in terms of features; customers tend to think in terms of benefits. In other words, vendors are thinking about a product, and customers are thinking about a problem. We need to take the vendor's competitive advantages (vendor values) and the customer's needs (customer values) and map them to each other so that the customer sees the vendor's product as a solution to his/her problem. Only then can we decide on which keywords to target. Integration is the key: your keyword strategy is an extension of your strategic business, marketing and sales objectives.

Landing Pages
When a searcher clicks on an ad, he/she is taken to a page on your website, which is known as the landing page, whether its your home page, a product page, or a page written specifically for the ad. A landing page for a paid ad needs to be relevant to that ad. That is, it has to deliver on the ad's promise. Further, if it is to be effective at converting clicks to sales, it must articulate an effective sales argument and present an irresistable call to action. Linking ads to existing pages on your site is often ineffective, because those pages were not written with the ad in mind, and may even be at cross purposes. Searchers are looking for the information they need to make an informed buying decision.

Google AdWords Management
Managing PPC campaigns can be labour-intensive. If you are contracting with a vendor for PPC campaign development and management, you should ensure your contract is clear with regard to deliverables and timing of deliverables. Deliverables should include (but not be limited to):

  • Bid management (daily to weekly): You need to keep your ads very close to the top of the listings for them to be effective (see User Behaviour below), so you need to manage your bids closely. How often will the PPC vendor review results and adjust bids?
  • Ad writing and variant testing: Frequent testing of the effectiveness of ads is necessary for peak performance and ROI.
  • Filtering: It's important that your ad reaches a large audience, but it should be a targeted audience. For example, if you're selling spring hedge plants, you don't want people searching for hedge funds to see your ad. You have to narrow the focus.
  • Reporting: How often will the PPC vendor report results to you? Will the reports include analysis and recommendations?

Organic SEO
PPC is often a good starting point for organic SEO. In fact, I often use AdWords to do keyword research. You can use AdWord results to refine your organic efforts. However, PPC should always be used in concert with organic SEO, because PPC on its own only reaches a certain percentage of searchers. See User Behaviour below.

User Behaviour
While PPC does deliver traffic, a large percentage of searchers ignore all put the top paid results. In the example below, a large percentage of users would read the "Define Widgets" (though they would not necessarily click on it), but be completely blind to the paid ads in the right column. This is partly an issue of real estate, partly about trust, and partly about limitations to the length of ad copy allowed by Google AdWords. On the other hand, searchers will regularly scan through up to 2 pages of organic results for a page that meets their needs. Click here for more information on user behavior.

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