John Hughes
Espotting co-founder, Seb Bishop, recently released a press statement claiming that the PPC model on Google (Adwords) was poorly targeted, especially for the UK market."Google is a late entrant into this market and their reach reflects this," he writes. "In Europe, they do not have 'the network effect'. With Google, your ad only appears on google.co.uk in the UK. With Espotting adverts can appear across our whole affiliate network."
Certainly, Espotting do feed their top PPC results to a large number of popular web-search properties, notably Yahoo! Europe, Lycos, Netscape and Ask Jeeves. Google's Adwords program, on the other hand, feeds only itself and AOL.com (for US targeted campaigns). This gives a comparative reach of 72% for Espotting, and 32% for Google.
Bishop argues that the success of the Adwords model depends on the users of Google. Do they use Google for research only, or also to buy products and services?
Certainly, bigmouthmedia clients have found that the Google model compares favourably with all other PPC model programs in relation to the number of clicks. It has comparable cost-per-clicks in most markets with Espotting, and considerably less than Overture in many. Traffic sourced by our clients Adwords programs are approximately six times higher than an identical campaign in Espotting, and twice that of Overture.
Traffic itself, however, is vanity. What online businesses are primarily concerned with is sales. And here is where the statistics really tell us nothing much so far. Conversion rates for our clients vary little between any of the PPC providers. It would seem at this stage that 100 visitors will convert to the same number of sales, more or less, regardless of whether they have come from Google, or via Espotting or Overture, or their partners.This of course may change. Google's massive advantage in the marketplace is that, by and large, people trust it. The fact that it has traditionally been more of a research tool than an online shopping mall is just a cosmetic detail in many ways. The rest of the PPC industry, on the other hand, has had to endure a rocky ride over the last few months, with certain sites in the US being threatened with litigation if they did not separate their PPC results from traditional search results. The trust relationship, in many ways, is not there at the current time.
This trust relationship could be the biggest challenge facing the European PPC models over the next 12 months. Nobody necessarily begrudges the existence of the bid-for-ranking model, as such, but many have been swayed by the inconsistent display of bid-for listings as actual search results.Google launched its Adwords service originally on a CPM basis, and the ads were born as a kind of text-based "banner", for all intents and purposes. The ads were clearly separated from search results. The current CPC version of Adwords maintains this separation from search results, and this may well be the secret of it's success. Even staunch banner-haters (myself included) have found ourselves occasionally clicking on an Adword ad if it was relevant enough to our specific search, and they usually are.
Quite how the European PPC engines intend to develop this user trust relationship to the levels Google enjoys remains to be seen. There is certainly no more or less relevance in the actual bid-for listings than in Adwords. Indeed, the clients we have enjoying these services find no real difference in the quality of traffic supplied (hence the almost equal conversion rates). So the question must ultimately lie in the presentation. What is it about Adwords that make people click on them, and what is it about other PPC networks' listings that make users less likely to click on them?
One other argument of course is demographic. Google users are from a sector that includes IT professionals, scientists and researchers - in other words high earning professionals. Although Google is used primarily for research, it has become a familiar search interface for these 'efluencials' - the Internet savvy high-spending market sector. Overture, for example feeds Freeserve - a large market sector, but with less disposable income. This ultimately has to have an effect on click-through rates, and hence on sales.This report really does not undervalue any of the PPC providers. As stated above, in our experience, they all have more or less the same click-to-conversion rate. Espotting and Google even have more or less the same average cost-per-click
My granny always told me it was unwise to keep all my eggs in one basket. At the time I used to think I'd rather have chocolate than eggs anyway, but these days I view that old saying as being utterly relevant to the PPC market. To get maximum exposure, run your campaigns across all the providers if you can, and integrate with a strategic SEO campaign, which, done right, will have a much lower CPC than any of the PPC models. This way, you'll maximise your brand presence, plus traffic, and therefore sales.
Hmmmm... it has never occurred to me before that I'd ever refer to a keyword as an egg?
