Episode 18 / October 6, 2017
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In this episode of The Redirect Podcast, the BlackTruck team explores some updates from the world of paid search.
Google AdWords Makes Changes to Daily Budgets
Google has announced AdWords may overspend your daily budget by 2x, automatically. Search Engine Land shares more on this change and what it means.
Google tweeted on Wednesday October 4th that the update was intended to help advertisers hit their goals. Note: This is NOT an optional feature. We’ll keep an eye on this and let you know what we see on our end.
Organic Clicks Shifting to Paid on Google
Brian Wood from Wayfair (a large home goods e-commerce site) shared insight on the Moz blog on how the company found the evolution of Google ads to impact clicks to their site on Google search engine results pages. Wayfair’s study was related to e-commerce intent search queries only, and branded queries were not included. They found that when comparing 2015 to 2017, organic clickthrough rate (CTR) lost 25% of click share on desktop, and 55% on mobile.
Top four search results were most heavily impacted. (Consider how much screen real estate shopping ads take up when they appear, especially on mobile screens). Brian was careful to point out that the data is “only applicable to e-commerce intent search queries, where ads and PLAs (product listing ads) are on nearly every query.”
The post also includes screenshots of how ads have visually changed over the years, from the yellow background calling out ads to the now very subtle ad flag outlined in green.
Though this generally isn’t something we’d encourage for most places on the internet, we do recommend reading the comments on the Moz article for some good discussion, as well.
Takeaway: E-commerce businesses should have paid ad strategies to capture click share through ads when they won’t be seen in the organic results. Brian recommends devoting similar investments to paid search and organic search to meet e-commerce goals.
