Ebay – PPC is a waste of money! – Video

This week Nick and James discuss the impact that branded PPC can have on your online presence and whether eBays recent suggesting Google ads are a waste of money is accurate.

Script: Welcome to this weeks video blog, Recently Mark Sweney a journalist for the Guardian wrote ‘Google keyword advertising is a waste of money, says eBay report‘.

The

research conducted by eBay suggested Google’s search advertising currently worth £3bn a year in the UK showed minimal returns, especially when paying for searches on your own brand name.

eBay concluded that if the ad wasn’t live users simply reverted to the organic listings and this in turn was more cost effective for brands.

Google’s own studies found that 89% of ads were incremental, but did suggest that campaigns differ dependent on various factors, including industry, competitiveness and geo-target.

We thought we would share our experience in this matter, the SEO industry was worth over £500 million in 2011 and we assume that growth has continued to grow in 2012 & 13, this is in inclusive of PPC & Organic. So anything which threatens that growth is an interest to us at Creare.

So, eBay suggests that branded clicks are a waste of money.. But there are several reasons we feel you should still use paid ads:

Competitors bidding on your brand, potentially you can lose targeted traffic and ultimately sales to your competitors. You can tho, protect your trademark via Google adwords if you have one.
Having visibility in both the organic listing & paid listings can improve you CTR (Click Through Rate). SEOMoz have done a great article ‘PPC & SEO are better together‘ linked from the supporting blog post, which backs up this theory.
Reputation Management, if you want to target consumers looking for reviews of your site, you can push any poor reviews down below a searchers screen fold with targeted PPC ads.
Research & Development, PPC gives you almost instant results and more importantly DATA! we often use PPC to drive our longer term organic strategy decisions and so should you, especially if your in a new market or selling a new product.

We need to consider how eBay isolated their tests, they have fantastic organic and brand presence on Google. With that in mind, eBay’s PPC may not be cost effective for those two reasons alone, but should all brands and businesses write off PPC to drive both branded and none branded traffic? definatly not.

If you have any questions or comments to add to the subject, please leave them on the supporting blog post.