Many marketers use PPC campaigns from Google’s Adwords or other programs in order to get the traffic they need while they are working on improving the rankings of their sites. Once they make it to the top one or two spots in Google’s SERPs, however, they stop investing as much into PPC, thinking that their site is already going to be at the top of the page so there is no need to pay for the advertising.
Google has recently released the results of a year-long study they performed which looked at 327 US AdWords accounts in 12 different markets. The study found that marketers who used the mobile ads an received 88% increase in the total number of clicks they received. This means that while the site owner may end up paying for a small number of clicks that they would have otherwise gotten for free through the organic results, the vast majority of people who are clicking on ads would not be clicking on the organic results anyway.
The specific markets had slightly varying numbers with Classified & Local markets seeing the highest percentage of clicks coming from the ads at a full 97%. The lowest of the categories in the study was healthcare, but they still saw an 83% increase in the total traffic.
The bottom line is that as long as there are advertisements at the top of Google’s SERPs (which will always be the case) it makes sense to invest in mobile advertising. Without paid traffic you are missing out on the majority of the potential for your site. Of course, the price per click, conversion rate and profit margin will have to be factored in as well.
What do you think about this? It seems that with such a huge amount of traffic clicking mobile advertisements it isn’t worth the effort many marketers are putting into mobile SEO strategies. As long as the price per click isn’t too high in a particular niche it would make financial sense to simply focus all the marketing dollars towards high-quality PPC campaigns.
