Acquiring visitors is a crucial part of any website and can’t be ignored. The best way to gain visitors is through managing and spending on marketing channels. The two key players in the marketing world are SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay Per Click). SEO acquires visitors for free through search engines such as Google, Bing etc. PPC does the same but the business pays for those visitor clicks. Could PPC be stealing clicks from SEO and cannibalising the cheaper option?
There are some very talented analysts spending their time researching keywords to find the best ones to bid on. The analysts want to find the best keywords with the most clicks at the lowest cost. Take the Compare The Market example above. The Cost per Click for "Home Insurance" currently sits at £15 (well £14.98). This means that every 100 clicks on that Compare The Market link will cost the business £1,500.
However, below we can see that Compare The Market appears in the PPC listings and at the top of the SEO results. Could PPC be cannibalising SEO? The PPC link costs you money, whereas the SEO link is free.
Working with my client using Cubed's data , we were able to put this to the test. Using Cubed's Keyword Analysis solution we were able to find other examples of PPC cannibalising SEO. Once discovered the volume of bidding on a keyword is lowered. We found in Cubed that the PPC sales did drop, as can be seen in red below. However, the SEO sales, in blue, increased during the same period. This demonstrates that PPC was stealing clicks from SEO.
Although the sales never quite reached the same height, the cost associated with these sales decreased.
If you were were spending £1,500 a day on acquiring visitors that create 1,000 sales then following this strategy you would lower the spend of PPC by 50%. As seen above, this would lead to a 17% drop of the original total sales, averaging 830 sales a day. Thus a drop of 50% in cost still returns 83% of the total sales, with savings of £750 a day. This would have a positive impact on any businesses' ROI.
This isn't just an isolated incident. We are seeing this across multiple clients and consistently throughout the year. When PPC spend has been lowered, SEO picks up those sales and saves on costs.
If you want to learn more about the Keyword Analysis and where you can save on ROI, then contact Nimbus Analytics.