Advertising on Search Engines: Use Organic or Paid?
All of the major search engines except MSN were birthed at universities. Both Google and Yahoo began their life at Stanford University. Their public mission statement is to organize the chaotic information of the Internet into a useful order that people can access based on their need using queries. All of them have evolved into corporate media entities. Their goal today is to make money by connecting queries of users to targeted advertisements. They are accountable to their stockholder. If you don’t believe that, I have an investment deal in Nigeria I’d like to tell you about. The problem comes in the fact that more than 80% of the user clicks go to the organic results (according to Jupiter Research). At the same time, almost all of Google’s income is from their paid advertising. So should you trust the organic or buy the ads?
You can expect to see, during the next few years, more and more targeted advertising as information about your searching patterns is sold to television companies and other media outlets. Google provides you with paths to information; you provide them with a profile of your searching patterns.
Now try an experiment. Go to Google and enter HDTV as a search word. Look at your organic results and then look at the sponsored results at the top and right. What is the difference between the two? The organic results are almost entirely content driven - how to purchase a HDTV television, reviews, how they work, etc. The sponsored advertisements are almost for all various companies selling the televisions. The Google algorithms are pretty good at separating the two. The organic results, in contrast with the sponsored, are primarily content-driven. The sponsored ones are purchased and positioned (in Google) from five variables, three of which are secret.
You will also see a few commercial sites that successfully figured out how to position themselves well in the organic results. I love the story John Battelle tells in his book The Search about 2bigfeet.com. Search on big feet and watch this site come up on top. John tells the story of this company and what happened when Google’s famous Florida Dance hit this site in his book.
Take a few more challenges and search for specific products, then compare to see the difference between the organic and sponsored results.
Back to our original question - use the organic ads or buy an ad? Paid ads will become increasingly important. With Google as a media company now, the paid ad industry will grow. It is particularly useful when selling unique products over large geographic areas and that don’t justify a store front, such as those shoes for big feet. But hey - he got his site working in the organic results. Try your product or service both ways and see what happens.