Thanks earl for your comment. I'm not that silly to assume no one's watching the adword buy, but I also know from experience that clients blindly take a 'better than the benchmark' as a sign of success - especially in the keyword space. Thanks again.
Thanks for your comment. Really enjoy the dialog.
The caveman spike is correlation, not speculation. It does correlate very closely, the news stories for the time period even other platforms like YouTube, trend very highly for Caveman around the same months... but you're right - I don't know for sure.
Where did you get your CTR stats? Those are intriguing. Our experience is very different. Thanks again!
Thanks for your comment. You don't need to buy the Caveman keyword... that's my point. What you need to do is convert people who are looking for caveman content at the height of it's popularity, and turn them into Geico loving insurance consumers. That IS the goal of the ad campaign, I would assume. I'd be surprised if their keyword campaign is THAT effective. If they don't buy the keyword, I'd imagine they see little to no drop in conversions.
Thanks again for the dialog.
So all Geico needs to do is convert people who are looking for cavemen into paying customers and they can stop paying $90 million a year to AdWords?
Honestly, your article doesn't make any sense. You're title is that Geico "wastes $90MM" a year in paid search. Yet you offer no evidence that Geico has a negative ROI on this spending.
If your point is that Geico isn't concerned with organic traffic, they are ranked #1 for "car insurance" and #2 for "car insurance quote". I think they seem to be doing alright.
What do you think the point of the Caveman commercials were? The appeal was "it's so easy, even a caveman could do it". The cavemen were an added benefit of a recognizable character. While Geico probably could have spent some time and money getting higher ranking for "cavemen", you don't provide any evidence that doing so would actually covert sales. Missing this is huge because common sense tells me that folks looking for the Geico Cavemen are probably more interested in some quick entertainment than car insurance.
Thanks so much for your comment. I too hope they’re doing some real testing and tracking to make sure they’re seeing a big ROI. Too often I’ve seen agencies hand deliver reports to clients that are ’stretching’ at best. All the client cares about is that they’re performing ‘better than the benchmark.’ As long as that’s the case, they don’t dive much deeper.
It's entirely possible to garner every result on the first page of search results, if the content is REAL content of value it can be done.
Thanks for the comment. Really appreciate it.
Thanks Omar. I think you make some great points. However, as much as google would like you to believe that AdWord buys are more successful than the top ten organic search results, that's just not the case. Organic search results have higher conversion rates than adword buys. Hands down. I'll give you the SpyFu inaccuracy, however, it's some insight into adword spending.
Also, although the post helps market tippingpoint, we're much more eager to spark a debate and engage in an active dialogue.
Thanks again for your insight.
How can you say that paid search traffic converts less than
organic search traffic? The beauty of paid search traffic is being able to target the RIGHT keywords for the RIGHT customer and the RIGHT time.
It is inherently wrong to say paid search traffic converts worse than organic search traffic because different variables will change the outcome (conversion rate). Those variables can be keywords, negative keywords, type of keyword matching, ad copy, time of day, landing page, geography, industry, product. I can change these variables and make the paid traffic convert poorly compared to the organic visitors. I can also tweak these variables and have my paid traffic converting much better than organic traffic!
What is my point? The data that you used to draw your conclusion, that organic is better than paid, was simply data from a poorly converting paid search campaign. Not to worry though, most paid search campaigns are full of flaws because a lack of understanding of the Adwords system.
Furthermore, Google does not want me to "believe" anything. I have websites that rank organically AND which receive paid search traffic (Google). I have my own data to draw conclusions.
Thanks for posting speek! Really appreciate it. I think I like your new name for the analysis: Tippingpoint Labs' New Media Life Cycle Analysis. (Although that's a mouthful.) Maybe we can come up with some cool ACRONYM. Anyone?
