The Shifting Landscape of Google Search

Published August 08, 2012 Share

I am on the beach in Hawaii this week, so Greg Squires was kind enough to step in and provide some insight about online marketing. Take it away Greg …
 
I first want to start by sharing this cool new infographic I found about how Google is monetizing their search engine results…
 

Find original infographic here
 
So, what does this mean to your brand?
 
Well, this means that brands, more than ever, need to bid on their own brand terms in Google Adwords. Google has made many modifications to paid ads to improve the click rate of these paid ads over organic listings, where brands have traditionally dominated.
 
Google has also made changes to the ad display to more closely resemble organic listings. The headline layout and destination URL are now in conformity with organic listings. As you can see in the infographic, the results show that 45.5% of those viewing the ads cannot identify paid ads on a search engine result page if there isn’t a right column.
 
Additionally, paid Google ads also offer more rich content to searchers. Paid ads are now commonly seen with seller review ratings, social data, product listings and pricing. The richer data along with the increased real estate these ads occupy has resulted in a dramatic increase in paid ad clicks. Correspondingly, this has resulted in a decrease in the number of clicks the #1 organic listing has for a search query. The #1 organic listing, usually thought of as the pinnacle of search engine result page real estate, now only gets 8.9% of clicks. (That’s right, we said 8.9%!)
 
 So, while most brands will rank very highly for their brand terms organically, and this traffic may have sufficed in past years, with Google’s recent layout changes brands must be bidding on their brand terms to protect their Google traffic from going to their competitors.
 
At Shopatron, our online marketing team supports a two-front approach to search engine traffic acquisition that consists of both bidding on brand terms in Adwords and focusing on continual optimization for organic traffic. In today’s world, only this method will insure growth in traffic, conversions and revenue no matter what changes Google rolls out next.