Just last week ebay released an in-depth study into the effectiveness and incremental value of paid adverts on search engines.
Their conclusions are that they have little measurable benefits!
Let’s face it, eBay are probably in the best position to do this analysis as they are one of, if not the biggest Google PPC advertiser. This means they have more data to analyse and track than anyone else.
Why would you carry on with PPC?
Their experiment into the adverts on search engines, discovered that most search adverts on most search terms have very little affect on sales at all.
Many companies buy adverts on searches for their brand. For example: Ebay, might buy adverts on searches for the term ‘eBay’ or ‘eBay shoes’
Throughout this experiment it actually confirmed what customers have often wondered, which is that those adverts actually do very little other than encourage users to click there instead of the normal natural search link.
Unbranded Searches do better
Within this experiment they got slightly better news for unbranded searches such as ‘food’ or ‘mobile phone’ As these companies might not be seen on the first page of the search and therefore the adverts that are bought will gain traffic. This could obviously have an impact on the use of PPC for venues.
In this scenario, the only way in which a company can get to the top of an unbranded search is by paying for it to be there.
Unaffected by paid adverts
eBay proved these results by testing their findings on their non-branded search term advertising for a period of 60 days. They found that this had a very small insignificant effect on their sales.
Google is the biggest seller of search adverts in the world.
The company made $37billion in 2013, from their various websites. That is a full two thirds of its gross revenue.
Google don’t break down their revenue beyond that, but it is believed that the majority of the income comes from search adverts.