Last week Google released a report about the 89% in incremental gains a brand earns when it has paid search advertising. After that report Google was flooded with questions and it has now released some answers to those questions. Some of which are very instructive for the social media agency.
The main question is about organic leaders in a search. If a website is the #1 result in a search organically, then is it still hurt when it cancels its paid search spending? Google answers that the question is based on a false premise. 81% of search results do not have an organic result on the first page. 66% of ad clicks occur when there is no organic result to be clicked on instead. While Google has not really answered the question, there are few times when the question actually matters. A brand should not make spending decisions on the hopes or suppositions that the question matters and should instead take the statistically likely method of maximizing its investment.
Even if a result is a highly placed organic result it can still benefit from paid search spending. When the organic result is number 1, half of the clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when paid search ads do not appear. When the organic result is ranked second to fourth, then the ad clicks are incremental 82% of the time. That number grows to 96% when the ranking is below 5.
While it is possible that a brand can dominate search rankings based on their organic rankings it is very unlikely. Even if a brand does have that name recognition, then it can still benefit from paid search ads. Social media agencies can choose to cancel it and try to strike out on their own, but those efforts probably do not return as high an ROI as paid search advertising does.
