to have or not to have adwords... has anyone got experience in playing the odds? here is my predicament... for a couple of days, we forgot to pay our adwords campaign / bids and were left to do organic results only. i thought the would would collapse but instead, we recorded the 2 highest ever sales intakes.... so here is what i am thinking: if your site is naturally very well optimised for page 1 SERPs and you also pay for adwords, it stands to reason for google to shove your results down the list whenever it displays an advert to your site: why give the user a chance to go to the site for free when they can get paid for the click, right? is there any truth to this, has anyone else done any experiments or has knowledge on the subject? i'd love to find out more - currently considering stopping adwords for a week as an experiment but if things do not go according to plan, it can cost a LOT of money in lost revenue... do google 'love' a site more when they are also a paying adwords customer? thoughts on a postcard... thanks
I like your thinking, but I think that you're looking at the problem from the wrong perspective. If you are ranking highly for certain search terms, why are you paying for an advert too? I've now taken the decision to not advertise for any Search terms where we consistently rank in the top 3 and have not seen any drop in visitors, but have seen a large decrease in the cost of advertising
Because: 1) In some areas the audience has a much lower level of understanding of the internet and do not know the difference between sponsored and natural results. These people may tend to click the first thing they see on the page. This is often a paid result. 2) Also in some areas, results are dominated by spammy or poor sites. Whether this affects your area or not it still may come into play through the resulting mindset of the consumer. I've met plenty of people who look first at the ads and feel if they're paying to show up, they must have what they're looking for. dimitar, I have never experienced what you're talking about here. You should give it more time to collect more info and compare. Some sites I've worked on require a prime of the pump meaning the consumer doesn't convert for a couple of days after first finding the website. So, a few days of not running Adwords would have no notifiable effect on conversions until days after it was off. Of course every industry runs on its own terms, but my experience has been more that Google give a bit more natural juice to sites using adwords. I've only noticed it with newer sites though and haven't collected a ton of data. My thoughts are when a website is approved to have ads displayed, it's much more likely to be a higher quality site or their system or manual reviewers would have flagged it. This seems to be a bit of a Google nod which seems to open the doors a little wider for a new site to gain trust.
so here is what i am thinking: if your site is naturally very well optimised for page 1 SERPs and you also pay for adwords, it stands to reason for google to shove your results down the list whenever it displays an advert to your site: why give the user a chance to go to the site for free when they can get paid for the click, right? Do you really think google have got nothing better to do with their time than keep cross-checking the serps and awords QS of every adwords user? And I don't think they are perfect, but if Google were really that corrupt I think they would have been exposed for it by now
I understand your concern but i think it is missguided I think we should stop seeing Google as the enemy, especially as a lot of us are in business with Google