PPC spend makes no sense

It may come as no surprise that business tends to spend the majority of it's online marketing spend on PPC advertising, we constantly bring the market place aware that organic listing out performs PPC.

We now have even more data to back this up, and we will conclude once again that spending large on PPC is ultimately a complete waste of marketing dollars.

PPC should be considered a secondary marketing medium, not a primary. We constantly remind the business community that natural sales techniques, and organic marketing mediums will always perform better, this is just psychology of the human mind and cannot be changed.

Let us now turn to more data to back up our reasoning.
Figures below relate to the USA market but still hold completely true for UK and AU

Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013.
- Source: C-Net News, June 30, 2008

SEO spend: $1.3 billion (11%)
- Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008

Research from SEMPO's data reveals it is 11% for SEO and 87% for PPC, SEM techniques account for another 1.4% further under 1% for paid inclusion.

Now if we look at the image below we will begin to see again why it makes no sense at all to be spending so much on PPC advertising.The image displays concentration of interest on a given SERP page (search engine results page), we can instantly see human psychology at work once again and further backs up our statements that you must embrace the psychology of how we react to adversing not try and fight it.

The above heat map is supplied by Eyetools, follow this link to read the report

Now we can see immediately that the majority of people are looking at the organic listings part of the search results, there really is not allot of interest going on in the PPC part of the page (right) this also further illustrates our thoughts that the first 5 listings are the most important real estate on the SERP page.

Organic Ranking Visibility

(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)

• Rank 1 – 100%
• Rank 2 – 100%
• Rank 3 – 100%
• Rank 4 – 85%
• Rank 5 – 60%
• Rank 6 – 50%
• Rank 7 – 50%
• Rank 8 – 30%
• Rank 9 – 30%
• Rank 10 – 20%

Side sponsored ad visibility

(shown in percentage of participants looking at an ad in this location)

• 1 – 50%
• 2 – 40%
• 3 – 30%
• 4 – 20%
• 5 – 10%
• 6 – 10%
• 7 – 10%
• 8 – 10%

In essence we can surmise that eyes are firmly fixed on the organic results, interesting isn't it. Now many of you are going to be saying so what! people still click on the ads more than the organic listings. WRONG...... Again let us turn to data to backup the cold hard fact, SEO will make you more money then PPC.

Thanks to the great people over at ComScore we can further illustrate PPC is a great way to spend money that could be better used on SEO. Read the article associated with this graph by following the linked text.

Now this really is the proof in the pudding, we can see yet again paid clicks have dropped now accounting for 22% of search traffic so this means that SEO accounts for 75% of all search traffic, taking notice yet? You should be.

We know PPC is an effective marketing medium and should be used in the marketing mix, but a critical eye should be placed on the spend, versus what is being spent on SEO. Using both marketing mediums correctly will ultimately lead to greater market share, it could be easily said though that SEO should attract the greatest share of the marketing budget.

Fact SEO is a better marketing solution than PPC

If you want to take advantage of SEO call We Seo today on 1300 78 50 60 or fill out our consultation form.