Just a week ago, Google’s Chief Economist Dr. Hal Varian and his team released the results of their five-month long research answering the question whether or not paid search ads cannibalize the traffic received by organic listings for identical keywords. There are many search managers and companies providing outsourced SEO answering the same question, and Google has tried to explain its effect on this study.
In a nutshell, the Google team found out that the paid search ads or Pay Per Click ads give its advertisers an 89% incremental lift in site visitors. This would be above and beyond the normal traffic you would expect from your organic listings. It seems to be supporting the existing conventional wisdom in the SEO industry and some previously conducted studies about the effect of paid advertising on brand terms and organic traffic.
The study was rigorous. Google collected data from 446 campaigns running from France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. They studied the campaigns that were paused after running the ads for a period of time and then deduced the estimated incremental impact of PPC ads on the total search volume. The only gripe you would probably see with this study is that more than half of the campaigns modeled were U.S. campaigns and were greatly dependent on data during the holiday period.
There are hints that the research is still ongoing and if it is true, then this gives people more time to see whether the 89% incremental lift holds true over the year. This should be informative for SEO companies like 365Outsource.com. 365Outsource.com offers advanced SEO, PPC Management, and SEM services such as link building, content writing. Learn more about our company.