When I started in pay per click marketing in 2005 the first thing I wondered was “who are these people clicks on sponsored links because I sure the heck don’t.” Often when I explain to people what I do at my job they react in the same way that I did, “people actually click on the paid ads?” The short answer is yes, a lot of people DO click on sponsored/paid advertisements. I am the type of person that is pretty good at tuning out commercials on TV, so when the internet got popular I thought I could apply those same skills, only now I need to block out banner ads and paid ads. Many friends and co-workers say that they are exactly like me, but if this is the case then who are all of these people clicking paid ads?
My hypothesis is that we only think we are avoiding PPC advertisements but a majority of us are actually ingesting them. One of the reasons I believe this is because of the heat-map study done by Marketing Sherpa.
Another reason why I know people are not avoiding PPC ads as much as they think is because of the shear amount of clicks we see in our PPC accounts. For most of my accounts the only limit to the amount of clicks a client can receive depends on their budget and which words they want to bid on.
Another interesting discovery I found while examining the heat map image was the heavy amount of focus on the number one organic listing. The orange/reddish areas represent the heavy eye tracked areas and they fall on the number one spot. It’s no wonder why everyone wants to be number one for all the search terms that represent their company, but we know it’s not possible to be number one on a lot of terms (especially with wikipedia.) For terms where it’s impossible to reach the number one organic spot a strategy might be to rank in the top 3 paid results. Actually if you believe that most people skip those first 3 paid ads you might use a strategy of targeting the number 3 spot because it is so close to the first organic listing. This could possibly explain why many paid search specialists like me try to achieve 2-4 ranking on many keywords and we see great ROI in that position.
So, whether you examine a heat-map or an actual paid search account you will see that many people do click on paid search advertising and as long as search engines dominate the internet, paid advertising will be a huge business. As far as who exactly is clicking on those paid search ads, I don’t know, it may be you.
2 Comments
I’ll start by answering your question: I click on paid search advertisements. I’ll click where ever I think I’ll get the information I seek. Sometimes the paid ads more directly address my concerns than the organic search items. Whether I click or not depends on the strength of the message–and the strength of the offer. Just like many more people respond to other forms of direct marketing than say they do, I’ll bet paid search provides a good ROI for those who can directly address their target audiences’ concerns and provide a compelling call to action!
Barbara you are right, sometimes paid ads more directly address a search than organic results. Paid search advertisers goal is to write compelling copy that addresses a user’s search and sends them to a relevant landing page. How do we know our ad copy is compelling? Constant A/B testing. And yes, in my experience paid search does provide good ROI that’s measurable for those who can directly address their audiences’ concerns. I agree, paid advertising is like direct mail, in that more people respond to it than say they do.
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