Laurie Sullivan wrote on MediaPost that only 1% of search advertisers drive 82% of clicks.
If you believe the results of a recent study examining Google AdWords clicks, it may seem that most marketers still don’t know how to run a successful paid-search campaign. While many think they do, only the top 1% of search advertisers in the categories of Retail, Hotels & Resorts, and Computer Hardware drive an average of 82% of search clicks in each category across the United States, the United Kingdom and France.
The study — conducted in January by AdGooroo, a Kantar Media company — examined search advertising activity in 10 business categories on Google AdWords in the U.S., the U.K., and France. With an average of 1% of brand marketers truly successful in search engine marketing, what will it take to distribute the clicks a little more evenly?
“The only way to move the needle on this 1% is for the other 99% of advertisers to raise their game and get better at search,” said AdGooroo CEO Rich Stokes. “This figure reflects the dominance of the top 1% of advertisers. Google runs a competitive marketplace with its ads, but that top 1% has become so effective they command 80% of the clicks by executing effective bid management, leveraging expansive keyword portfolios, providing a solid consumer experience, and more.”
I know that I talk to a number of small businesses that got discouraged when trying to run a Google AdWords campaign, they were lost by the quality score and the minimum bid system. I think you have to read, test, read and test some more and always keep tinkering with your Adwords strategy to increase your chances for a successful campaign.
Sounds fallacious. These are very different statements:
(A) 1% of advertisers generate 82% of clicks.
(B) “1% of brand marketers [are] truly successful in search engine marketing”.
We’d expect there to be thousands upon thousands of small businesses running AdWords campaigns that don’t add up in total volume of impressions to the campaigns of a single company such as Amazon. So, of course, if you tally up those many thousands of advertisers, you’ll see Amazon.com getting vastly more clicks.
They should be comparing clicks normalized by volume of impressions — click-through rate, basically. Comparing absolute clicks as if ad spend were distributed equally among all online advertisers … that won’t allow anybody to make inferences about SEM proficiency.
I haven’t read the original study. But the summary of that study, as paraphrased in MediaPost, doesn’t support the conclusions the author is making. 100% nonsense as written.
When companies like Microsoft, State Farm, ATT, BP etc…. are spending each close to or over 100 million per year on Google search and every other mega corporation is also then it’s pretty easy to understand that the top 1% are obviously the big mega brands.
When the mom and pop store is spending a couple grand a year and BP is spending over 100 million and your grouping every business in the same study then of course the numbers are going to be outrageous in one direction or another.
It’s basic math, those who spend the most get the most clicks. I don’t understand how the writer doesn’t get that.
how do they know the click stats if they are not the advertiser?
Yes, this is kind of silly. Big companies have the advantage of scale, higher profit margins, and massive brand awareness campaigns. Paid search on Google is the gold standard for traffic, but it is very, very expensive. If you’re not a big brand, you only have a shot on Adwords if most of these apply:
1. You have a decent-sized marketing budget to play with.
2. You have a category killer domain.
3. You have some level of vertical integration in your supply chain.
4. Your niche is not dominated by big brands.
For a really good example, listen to DomainSherpa’s interviews with Luke Webster of StraightRazor.com. It sounds like he’s doing great on Adwords.
After all of the above are covered, then a company can start worrying about bid management, creative optimization, etc. The study was created by AdGooroo, which is just selling their search tools. Nothing wrong with that, but let’s be honest about the playing field here.
They’re bots.
Todd, thanks for the post. Saved me time.
@ Dave Mead said: “Luke Webster of StraightRazor.com. It sounds like he’s doing great on Adwords.”
Those interviews were interesting: March 2013’s and February.
According to the MediaPost article, “Consumer Packaged Goods category” is where, “success gets spread a little thinner” – only 71%. If you take a subset of that, Straight Razor is in the 29%, but imo the gap is even wider, because, the large companies are, “getting clicks from china,” as @PunkRock says.
What Luke Webster does with VintageStraightRazor.com gains even more sales for his company than what the buyers and sellers of traffic generate for the large companies they rep! But advertising is sick.
Maybe Google’s purchase of Spider.io will purge sleaze and fraud from the ad business!
Google Bought Spider.io To Purge The Sleaze And Fraud From The Ad Business
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-bought-spiderio-2014-2
Maybe advertising will finally grow up, and publishers will have to charge more for vetted clicks, instead of this cheap supply of adwords which is StraightRazor’s main source of conversions, according to Luke Webster. What happens to StraightRazor when Adwords zooms in cost? Is that perhaps why StraightRazor.com is listed for sale?
What happens to parking revenue, when Google blocks even more phony clicks?
A ‘Crisis’ in Online Ads: One-Third of Traffic Is Bogus
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304026304579453253860786362-lMyQjAxMTA0MDIwMzEyNDMyWj
$6 billion? $6 billion? We must discern what percentage of that devolves from parked pages, such as Credits.com’s redirect to FreeResultsGuide.com, which has huge traffic from redirects of all kinds or urls redirecting to it.
coo video of \bBotnet ads out of view, being loaded onto infected computers:
Thousands of Apps Secretly Run Ads That Users Can’t See
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-23/thousands-of-apps-secretly-run-ads-that-users-can-t-see
The above is what lead to my discovery of Forensiq botnet video, posted in my comment, above.
If you guys want to write about it, that is the kind of stuff I am interested in!
Here is a the video about that report. It’s interesting, because GirlsApps.mobi is registered under privacy through Godaddy. Google removed it from its Google Play store, after the Bloomberg report!
https://player
ad fraud via apps may consume 2G of your date in one day! Besides wear down your battery . . .
https://vimeo.com/user28999497/forensiq-mobile-app-fraud-study