On the Wayfair SEO team, we keep track of our non-branded click curves: the average click-through rate (CTR) for each ranking position. This helps us accurately evaluate the potential opportunity of keyword clusters.
Over the last two years, the total share of organic clicks on page one of our e-commerce SERPs has dropped 25% on desktop and 55% on mobile.
For the ad-heavy non-local SERPs that we work in, paid ads are likely now earning nearly the same percentage of clicks as organic results — a staggering change from most of the history of Google.
Organic CTR loses 25% of click share on desktop, 55% on mobile
Looking at 2015 vs 2017 data for all keywords ranking organically on the first page, we’ve seen a dramatic change in CTR. Below we’ve normalized our actual CTR on a 1–10 scale, representing a total drop of 25% of click share on desktop and 55% on mobile.
Organic receives 25% less desktop CTR and 55% less mobile CTR compared to two years ago.
The much larger drop on mobile is particularly relevant because we’ve seen large traffic shifts to mobile over the last two years as well. The overall percentage drop plays out somewhat similarly across the first page of results; however, the top four were most heavily impacted.
The first four organic results were most heavily impacted by the CTR shift from organic to paid.
About the data
It’s important to note that this type of CTR change is not true for every SERP. This data is only applicable to e-commerce intent search queries, where ads and PLAs are on nearly every query.
We gather the impression, click, and rank data from Search Console. While Search Console data isn’t quantitatively correct, it does appear to be directionally correct for us (if we see clicks double in Search Console, we also see organic Google traffic double in our analytics), site improvements that lead to meaningful CTR gains appear to be reflected in Search Console, we can roughly verify impressions via ad data, and we can confirm the accuracy of rank. For purposes of this data pull, we excluded any keywords that Search Console reported as a non-integer rank (such as ranking 1.2). We have thousands of page one keywords, including many large head terms comprising millions of combined clicks, which gives us a lot of data for each ranking position.
We remove all branded queries from the data, which hugely skews click curves.
It’s important to note that paid ads are not getting all the clicks that organic is not. In addition to the small number of people who click beyond the first page, a surprising number do not click at all. Our best guess is that all ads combined now get about the same percentage of clicks (for our results) as all organic results combined.
Why is this happening?
It’s no secret to SEOs who work on transactional keywords why we no longer gain as large a share of clicks for our best rankings. We suspect the primary causes are the following:
- Ads serving on more queries
- More ads per query
- Larger ads, with more space given to each ad
- Google Shopping (which show up on more queries, list more products per query, and take up more space)
- Subtler ad labeling, making it less obvious that an ad is an ad
At Wayfair, we’ve seen Google Shopping results appear on more and more search queries over the last year. Using Stat Search Analytics, we can track the growth in queries serving Google Shopping results (modified by search volume to give a qualitative visibility score) across the 25,000 keywords we track daily on mobile and desktop. The overall share of voice of Google Shopping has grown nearly 60% in the last year.
Number of transactional queries serving Google Shopping has grown nearly 60% in the last year.
On top of this, we’re often seeing four PPC ads for a typical non-branded commercial term, in addition to the Google Shopping results.
And with the expanded size of ads on mobile, almost none of our queries show anything other than ads without scrolling:
This great image from Edwords shows the steady growth in percent of the desktop page consumed by ads for a query that has only three ad results. We go from seeing five organic results above the scroll, to just one. In more recent years we’ve seen this size growth explode on mobile as well.
At the same time that ads have grown, the labeling of ads has become increasingly subtle. In a 2015 study, Ofcom found that half of adults don’t recognize ads in Google, and about 70% of teenagers didn’t recognize Google ads — and ad labeling has become substantially less obvious since then. For most of its history, Google ads were labeled by a large colored block that was intuitively separate from the non-ad results, though sometimes not visible on monitors with a higher brightness setting.
2000 – Shaded background around all ads:
2010 – Shaded background still exists around ads:
2014 – No background; yellow box label next to each ad (and ads take up a lot more space):
2017 – Yellow box changed to green, the same color as the URL it’s next to (and ads take up even more space):
2017 – Green box changed to a thin green outline the same color as the URL:
What to do about it
The good news is that this is impacting everyone in e-commerce equally, and all those search clicks are still happening — in other words, those users haven’t gone away. The growth in the number of searches each year means that you probably aren’t seeing huge losses in organic traffic; instead, it will show as small losses or anemic growth. The bad news is that it will cost you — as well as your competitors — more money to capture the same overall share of search traffic.
A strong search marketing strategy has always involved organic, paid search, and PLA combined. Sites optimizing for all search channels are already well-positioned to capture search traffic regardless of ad changes to the SERPs: if SEO growth slows, then PLA and paid search growth speeds up. As real estate for one channel shrinks, real estate for others grows.
If you haven’t been strongly invested in search ads or PLAs, then the Chinese proverb on the best time to plant a tree applies perfectly:
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
With a similar percentage of clicks going to paid and organic, your investment in each should be similar (unless, of course, you have some catching up to do with one channel).
Excellent revelation here Brian, and thanks for sharing the massive amount of data that Wayfair has - very useful. It's almost more useful coming from just one domain rather than across multiple domains because the variable is the multiple SERPs and the constant is the domain, so it at least removes some confounding factors.
In order to mitigate the organic losses, have you made any moves to focus higher up the funnel in your SEO efforts? Such as building out your content marketing more than focusing on purely the commercial queries/pages? Or are you just going to put more effort into PLAs and AdWords?
Right now there's still much higher ROI on the transactional keywords, and the best SEO mitigation strategy seems to be to move faster and grow so fast that you outpace the shift from increased ad presence. Even in the extreme ad situation we find ourselves in now, there's still at least half the clicks going to SEO, and too few sites put equal resources behind their SEO efforts as they do the paid side. There's often room for big and fast SEO growth.
In comparison to previous data organic clicks have been decreased than paid. Reason behind - may be the changes with Google ads that looks quite similar as organic results (thanks for the briefs in post). So the only thing we can do is start spending wisely on paid ads too because who knows what Google is planning for future.
Wondering, what SEOs will do when first SERP will be full of paid results (hopefully not sooner)? ;)
I preffer/hope/tend to think that Google won't end being all paid results, just because I don't think that they'll manage to make a SERP full of ads a good experience for their users. But well, only time will tell!
Thanks for sharing your observations, Brian.
I've seen the same trend for my own sites. I've interpreted it a little differently, in that a #1 organic ranking delivers less traffic these days than it did a few years ago - even though search volume has remained relatively constant. But, same result as what you are seeing.
I would further break it out into two different sectors.... retail and informational. In retail, you will almost always now have a big block of Adwords above the organic SERPs, in addition there can be shopping results up there too or along the right margin of the SERPs. It's getting much harder to sell from the organic SERPs - even if you are putting more work into it.
For informational queries, the Adwords and Shopping Results distractions are still frequently present, but there are also image results, "people also ask" endless expansions, featured snippets, knowledge boxes, news results, instant answers and more. If you can't grab the #1 organic position or the featured snippet, you don't have the same access to searchers as you did just a few years ago.
Today, you can go to the office and work hard every day and not get the same movement of the needle as you could a few years ago. I am sure that a lot of people have seen their efforts produce red ink because they don't have the horsepower to remain competitive.
Sounds exhausting!!
Yes, #1 definitely delivers less CTR than a few years ago - a LOT less on mobile. The difference in traffic between #1 and #2 is smaller than it used to be (not counting branded queries), but we still see that traffic from the #1 position converts substantially better than traffic from other positions, so that #1 spot remains disproportionately valuable.
The graphics mapping changes from 2000 to 2017 really tell the story, as well as how much of mobile is covered by advertising in the earlier listings.
My personal take is that Google will keep at least keep some amount of organic above the fold on desktop as a principle... unless they spin the pay-to-play-as-proof-of-trust model out across all platforms.
Mobile however is already heavily dominated by paid listings, often requiring multiple page scrolls in order to see unpaid listings. If those ad listing searches combine with your user-base transitioning to mobile it almost becomes a necessity to advertise in order to gain some top rank visibility.
This kind of research coupled with how little or how much traffic a site can receive by switching on/off advertising within Google shows just how much a monopoly the company has gained in certain markets and platforms.
Hi Brian,
The ads on Bing are even more subtle than the ones on Google. I'm wondering if we we see a response to these advertising practices from the FTC.
Personally, I think Bing's greatest defense is that Google, the monopoly, is doing it too. And Google appears to have pretty effective lobbying. I think if we see a regulatory response to ad labeling, it will come from the EU.
Great piece Brian, this is really helpful to see. Have you seen any kind of similar trends for local searches as well? We've seen a pretty noticeable decrease in local organic traffic to a lot of clients recently, and we're not sure if it's getting filtered more to Google My Business actions or to paid searches. Any insights you've seen on that front?
We don't work in the local space, aside from the odd SERP with a local pack, so I don't have good enough data there to form an opinion. Sorry!
Across the board we are seeing aggregate less organic/direct traffic and more and more and more ppc clicks. It is utterly striking on the mobile side where every one of our smb's is seeing more ppc traffic.
When we cut or limit ppc spend traffic drops. With the bulk of traffic coming from mobile it is very telling. On mobile we are looking at pay to play
This is especially true for local businesses. Ads are already being placed in the local three pack and with the rollout of Google Guarantee, we can only expect the paid search clicks to continue to increase.
JR - Much (but not all) of that local search traffic is going to GMB. When someone can call, request directions or just read the information on your local store profile the need for local clicks drops dramatically.
I looked at this for one smb that generally gets more web traffic than our others. Compared to about 5 years ago:
1. Our adwords spend is much higher though our adwords visibility and reach has shrunk. Regardless ppc clicks are about 10% higher than 5 years ago. The huge increase is via mobile. We shrunk the adwords campaigns because they were getting too expensive. Regardless adwords clicks are UP!!!
2. Google organic traffic is about 30% less than 5 years ago. That drop includes some irrelevant traffic, but it includes a general reduction including relevant traffic.
3. Our volume of leads is about the same; possibly a wee bit higher than 5 years ago.
4. BTW: We measure demand by impressions in adwords covering some core campaigns that haven't changed in volume. If google search for relevant terms is a close approximation for demand/ or demand on the web...its about the same as 5 years ago.
5. Also BTW: we suspect some of the google traffic is showing up as direct. How much we aren't sure.
Undoubtedly we have lost organic traffic to ads. We have lost organic traffic to our own ads.
One VERY LARGE PLACE WHERE IT IS SHOWING: Google Maps/the 3 Pac
In the last year we have had a significant increase in clicks to adwords. The most significant change has occurred inside the 3PAC/Maps with ads showing. As I understand it; Clicks on ads that are described as "Get Location Details" are more simply and directly related to ads in The 3 Pac or Maps. Over the last two years we have seen an enormous increase tied to this "category". It corresponds directly to when google started putting ads in the 3 pac.
Here is what we discovered. We measured these Get Location Details volumes for 2 consecutive years starting from the most recent period. I could go back and tie the two dates to when google started showing ads in the 3 pac...but haven't done so...yet. Regardless, over the last 12 months it is inclusive of a period when ads showed in the 3 pac. In the previous year there were only a few months with ads in the 3 pac.
1. Ads in the 3 pac/maps (get location details) (impressions). Increased by about 8 times from one period to the next.
2. Clicks on ads in this section increased by about 10 times from the previous year.
Here is our dilemma. We know that in the 3 pac our smb shows up FIRST an enormous amount of the TIME.
Simply we are losing clicks in the 3 pac to our ad in the 3 pac, which sits above our organic/locational First in the 3 pac.
Because of these ads we are losing organic/maps clicks to ppc clicks. It is expensive.
Google is morphing into a pay for play search engine. Its on all search. Its on local search. Its a tough nut.
I've definitely noticed this trend over the last year. It's had both negative and positive effects on my clients. I've moved some of them over to shopping to compensate for the drop off in CTR. This has maintained revenue but inflated cost/over revenue a bit meaning our budgets are stretched. On the bright side it's nice to see every penny being help accountable for the revenue it does or does not bring in. I've always like that about PPC, it's very measurable.
Really good post, highlighting something that’s been happening for a long time.
It seems that the general reaction to this is one of concern.
I like to look at this slightly differently - it’s a great opportunity.
Make the most of the traffic you do have. Convert twice as much traffic as your competitors to outpace and outgrow them.
Build a product so brilliant that people recommend you and seek you out by name.
Stop looking at SEO in isolation. Even for the biggest brands it’s but one tool in your arsenal.
If you’re measuring ROI based on bottom of the funnel keywords then yes, you may struggle. What else can you do? Partnerships? Offline? PR? Clever remarketing from top of funnel activity?
We’re all in the same boat. It’s not a challenge unique to one business. Unless of course your business is one-dimensional SEO and you’re not already an established player.
I for one welcome the challenge...
Erm...
"For purposes of this data pull, we excluded any keywords that Search Console reported as a non-integer rank (such as ranking 1.2)."
That's a pretty big exclusion!
It is indeed, but it's the only way to have confidence in the average CTR of each ranking position. Unfortunately that means that only big sites can really get accurate average CTR by position data.
Thanks for sharing this info, Brian. I'm quite interested in the exclusion too. If you exclude any non-integer keyword ranking from your data (and I understand in theory why you'd do that) then with exception to position 1.0 - which could only be 1.0 if it had been in 1st position for the entire period - your rankings could have fluctuated anywhere else between 2nd and 10th but still returned an integer average... right?
If a query was in 6th position for 14 days and then moved up to 2nd for 14 days, then your average position over a 28 day period is 4.0, even though the keyword's CTR won't at any point have been reflective of 6th or 2nd position.
You'd also imagine that many of the position 1.0 keywords are likely to be branded, which you excluded of course, so perhaps many non-branded terms with more admirable CTR were in positions 1.1 - 1.9?
Just thinking out loud. No denying your conclusion is correct and there's no doubt that organic real estate is dwindling on Googs... Thanks again for the post.
That's definitely a good call out. The reason we do it this way is our main goal is knowing the average CTR for each position for our keywords, so we're trying as much as possible to look only at keywords that haven't changed position. It's certainly possible that a keyword changed position such that the average comes out as a whole number.
That said, we have hundreds or thousands of keyword for each ranking position, and it's unlikely that many of them moved in just the right way -- and we can use #1 position as a sanity check, since we know those haven't had multiple positions. But we certainly could have double checked each one against our rank tracking history to make sure it hadn't moved -- I just didn't think of it!
Hey Brian,
I'm definitely noticing a drop in traffic via organic visits, and I also work in ad-heavy, non-local space - travel and tourism. I'm just wondering though, is tracking CTR via Search Console reliable and accurate or is it just good for a broad overview?
I can often take Google's data with a pinch of salt - especially in analytics when you get keywords (not set)
Large CTR changes seem meaningful -- though I'd advise filtering out brand queries, which have a disproportionate impact and cloud the data. I think the best way to track the impact of ads is through good rank tracking: if you can demonstrate a steady improvement in rankings while traffic is flat or down to those same page types, that's a strong data point. Then Search Console CTR is a good sanity check against that (because it's possible you're losing traffic to keywords you're not tracking).
It's a bit more complicated when your traffic is growing, but growing slower than your rankings suggest it should be. On the PLA side, we found Stat to be an invaluable tool to monitor SERP changes like PLAs (and many other features like image blocks, knowledge graph, etc) that could change click behavior.
Overall I'm a fan of pulling in data from multiple places wherever possible to draw stronger conclusions, and try not to act on just one data source. But I also think that good rank tracking (which requires good keyword selection) is the foundation of that data.
Cheers Brian,
Yes I've got decent rank-tracking in place and any organic traffic loss is probably attributable to a loss of ranking of late. I'll keep my eye on it though and see can I correlate any rise/loss rankings with any rise/loss in traffic.
Hi Brian
Indeed. Each time paid advertisements are more frequent and above all with greater capacity to attract the attention of the potential client.
With these ads, ranking 1st is like ranking 5th. With local searches, ranking 1st is like ranking on 2nd page.
Awesome insights brian. You just given a rewind of how google SERP have changed in just few years. Importantly in above the fold section of Google 1st pages.. It is equally important to focus on ads too for large companies and corporations. Small businesses can't compete unless the query is local specific. Even local keywords are too competitive as ads are growing up into the local packs especially.
Thanks for the analysis, Brian. Was there any effort to account for the updates Google has made to search analytics reporting? Specifically the updates made in late April 2016 and mid-July 2017 that impacted how impressions are counted.
Great piece of analysis. Thank you for sharing such information. It is pretty rare we have enough traffic to test all of these. SEO is getting more and more complicated. That looks like SEO is now only for bottom of the funnel queries, and that more and more we are going to lose the need to try to rank for top of the funnel queries, and turn to PPC instead.
This is especially true for local businesses. With the rollout of Google Guarantee, we can only expect the paid search clicks to continue to increase.
Personally I wonder what that will do to local business' budgets in the long term. The average spend on PPC seems to be going up across the board as well, making it more difficult to drive potential customers and/or leads.
Not a surprise. Ads are becoming indistinguishable to the untrained eye, and with the competition constantly evolving (and throwing more money at PPC) we often find that PPC'ing on terms where our clients rank high organically anyway is ever becoming more necessary if you want to get the most visibility and - in cases where auctions are dominating that space - if you don't want to drop below the fold.
This blog would open the eyes of all SEO Professional who trust Google. Now it is Perfect time to bing and other search engine do something different .
For what benefit? The issue is share and Google owns a majority of share in search and an even bigger share of searches with local intent.
If it is to name it;
Approx. of 2016 - Google - Global 71.11% / Bing (Microsoft) 10.65% / Baidu (China) 8.73% / Other 1.52%
I'm curious about ruling out the fractional positions - as those are where personalisation comes into play as I understand it. I can't imagine it changing the direction of your findings but I'd love to see the analysis with them in place - visualising it more as a curve than a bar chart, I guess?
Hey Brian,
I agree with you about the space Google Ads have consumed these days in the SERP. The first fold in mobile and desktop have been totally consumed by ads and the organic results are nowhere to be seen.
But, I don't agree with the CTR bit. Yes, I know the organic CTR has gone down in the past few months but the amazing thing here is even after pushing so much Ads in the SERP, the CTR has not grown much. My point here is users are getting smarter day by day on how they use internet. People who can differentiate between ads and organic results, most of them directly scrolls down the first fold and clicks on organic result. Also, the other reason for the organic CTR going down are the featured snippets and knowledge graphs. Google is trying to answer directly most of the queries in the form of snippets and because of this users doesn't needs to click on any results.
I really think sometimes that Google hates SEO.
The data we have suggests pretty strongly that the clicks are shifting to paid -- we don't have any featured snippets on our ecommerce queries, and we see organic CTR/traffic go down when we see large increases in paid presence (in particular PLA expansion has happened in bursts that allows us to line up CTR changes with the PLAs).
Great article, and useful information to back up the things I've seen over the last few years. It's a good opportunity in those spaces which aren't already dominated by a massive ad budget, or by potentially doing something different with creative. But it's a bit of a shame for smaller businesses, particularly in local niche areas, who don't have the budget to invest heavily in Adwords - and are often competing against national franchises which do.
SEO is dead!!!! *oldgoodjoke*...
It's crazy how organic search results are slowly disappearing in the floods of ads. Just hoping Google is not going towards the same fate as Facebook.
I think a lot of us assumed this transition was happening but didn't have strong data to back it up - thanks for sharing your insights Brian!
Thanks for sharing your very valuable insights. One question in that context that is always bothering me is:
For a specific keyword combination: "If I am placed well on organic search (1-3), have an ad (AdWords) on place 1 and am also inside the local listings is it still worth spending money on paid search (AdWords)? I mean its probably better to fill in another slot for sure but is it really worth it? I know our cost per lead, etc. but how to evaluate that. Any smart idea on the topic?
You will drive incremental traffic with the ad; however, if you're ranking top organically your ad *may* cannibalize some of the organic traffic. Whether it's a good idea is something you have to test -- do a controlled test with ads in some geographic regions and not in others, and turn them on and off to see how much incremental revenue you're driving. Then you can evaluate the true ROI of the ads.
Whether it's a good idea or not depends on your actual keywords, SERPs, and your competition. I've seen plenty of instances where a competitor is over-bidding (usually because they're working with budgets, rather than on a performance basis) making the ads not profitable until the competition eventually resumes sanity. Another danger, of course, is competition that is more profitable or efficient than you and thus can make money by spending more.
Seems hypocritical doesn't it? Google says its goal is to provide people with access to relevant information from the most reliable sources available. Yet the search results, especially on mobile, are flooded with paid advertising before you can get to see the "relevant information" that isn't biased by the pay to play of paid search.
What feels particularly hypocritical to me is that Google will penalize a site for having too many ads above the content. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they do, but I wish they'd apply to themselves the standards they apply to the rest of the web.
Google acts in violation of the law. The law stipulates that each advertising has to be identifiable.
This is not only written in laws but in Code of Conduct:
https://www.arpp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/co...
For me Google has become a big scam. It is time to shift to alternatives like Opera browser, DuckduckGo as search engine, ...
Hi Brian, Thanks for this really great article. Like it shows in the image from Edwords this change of Google constantly increasing the real estate on the serps used by ads has been going on for a long time. But now the combination of the larger ads and the major shift to mobile for most of the searches, has katapulted the effects on ctr´s for organic results, as you show in you graphs..
I remember the organic results getting up to 80% of the clicks, which now is down to maybe 50%. Brian do you think there a limit to where Google can go with this or could we end up with a pure comercial / google features Serp without any substancial organic results getting the traffic for transactional queries (i wouldn´t hold it possible for the informational ones - though nothing is impossible)?
I don't think there's any danger of Google going paid only -- that may be the one thing they could do to lose their market share. However, I could see Google regularly having no organic results above the scroll on desktop, and I'm certain they will continue to make the ads increasingly more attractive and enticing.
I don't think we've seen the end of the migration of clicks to paid, but I also don't think it's able to go a lot further. Mobile is a good benchmark for about as bad as it can get: even with sometimes 2 screens of ads and really attractive PLA carousels and huge paid search ads, we still see around half the clicks going to organic.
I suspect desktop will get a bit worse over time, but Google is taking about all the click share on mobile that they possibly can now.
wondering what that will do to local business' budgets in the long term.
The average spend on PPC seems to be going up across the board as well, making it more difficult to drive potential customers and/or leads.
Cheers!
[Link removed by editor.]
But for Google, they don't see any change in CTR for organic vs paid. I asked this question during hangout with Google India webmaster hangout. They told me that don't see any much difference in CTR wise whether paid listings are getting better or organic is not.
Google tends to be pretty careful how they phrase things, and there are a lot of scenarios where they could be telling the truth: perhaps they were talking about paid ads and not counting PLAs in there; perhaps they were referring to a specific timeframe during which not a lot changed, perhaps if they look at *all* queries worldwide (where huge quantities still trigger zero ads because they are completely non-commercial) there isn't a meaningful change, etc.
But fundamentally the ad/organic balance of the SERPs have changed drastically over the years: more ads showing, and ads taking up the majority of the above the scroll space (and all of it plus on mobile). Google wouldn't be doing that if it wasn't driving more clicks to ads, particularly given all the regulatory headaches it causes. Anyone deep in the paid space already knows that much more clicks are going to those ads than in years past, and this data on one part of the organic space is pretty compelling.
Quite scary news Brian :-(
I agree with you, the advertisements are getting more and more space in Google while they look more attractive fro the users.
Is it going to kill SEO for transactional keywords? i hope no...
I see 0 Ads and a full page of all organic. How many people now run an ad-blocker?
It depends on where you're located and the devices you're referring to. More people use it in Europe than in the US but more people use it on PC than mobile. Since more and more traffic is shifting to mobile a small percent of people in the US are blocking ads. This is why Google is planning on adding an ad blocker in Chrome, so the mobile experience can improve without people adding in something 3rd party that could be more aggressive than Google and greatly reduce ad revenue.
was wondering about this as I find myself clicking on ads more and more often,
2 years ago, I didn't even read them, now I often click on ads, especially when I use a commercial query.
thanks for sharing the data.
ery interesting. It is quite clear why this is in Google's favour.
Excellent article. Loved your year-after-year analysis of the Google Search results and the way Ads are displayed. Found it very insightfull.
I love all the data backing the decision. Thank you for a lot of hard work Brian. I wonder if the final conclusion "With a similar percentage of clicks going to paid and organic, your investment in each should be similar" should be modified with some kind of a factor to account for the age of your website. It seems like investing in paid advertisement should give the same benefits regardless of the age and rank of your website. If a newer site invests heaver in paid advertisements, it could benefit SEO (for example increasing organic back links). Of course, the counter argument could be made that heavy SEO investment upfront in a website will yield better long term results because it's always easier to build something right than to fix it later. Perhaps that's what you meant by your qualifier "unless, of course, you have some catching up to do with one channel " since a new website will be seriously behind on SEO.
Love seeing this data. We've always been a big fan of blending the benefits of both...Paid Ads for fast results and Organic for the long term play. Looks like maintaining a MARKETING strategy (not just an SEO strategy) will continue to pay off for your clients and/or your own business.
Reehinditrick
Anybody expected anything else? Even Google has their stock options holders, and internet is not growing in double digit numbers every year, moveover with Facebook stealing significant chunk of traffic as a starting point to the internet. Now we are at 50% coverage of ads on google, it seems like pure definition or MFA website :-) The basic question is - what percentage of ads is a point, where we can easily say that Google is not a search engine any more... I think Google has just reached point bravo - many advertisers cannot call AdWords as a performance marketing any more due to insane CPC's, agencies are well-educated, so the fight has no winner due to better account setup etc... There is almost nowhere to grow and logical point is to make ads bigger and bigger...