Why do PPC Account Managers get all the Girls?
There has been a healthy debate in the office this week between Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Account Managers and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Programmers. The theme of the debate? Whose better, of course! Who rules the roost in online advertising - PPC or SEO? As a PPC Account Manager, I may be ever so slightly biased, but ever since Engine Ready, an Internet market company, found that “visitors who clicked on paid links were 17% more likely to buy something, and spend about 18% more on each order” the PPC Account Managers have had plenty of ammo in their guns.
Some of the more bitter SEO Programmers, who probably spend their evenings repeatedly clicking on PPC ads while laughing manically and stroking fluffy white cats on their lap, claim that PPC is on its last legs. This simple fact of the matter is this: Google is a giant and it will never let the PPC it relies on die.
For Google, PPC is like a roulette table in a casino. When the ball lands on a number in the roulette wheel, a marker is placed on this number. All the chips that aren’t lucky enough to be underneath the marker are scrapped down a small trapdoor and they fall onto an ever-growing mountain of chips underneath the table. That image – heaps of nulled chips (each with cash denominations of £1, £5, £25 and £100) being poured into a hidden compartment after every spin of the wheel – remind me of Google. How many searches are carried out on Google every day? How many searches are being carried out on Google right this second? Tens of millions and for every conceivable product and service imaginable. With every click on a PPC ad during these searches, it is money pouring into Google coffers. Each click credits money to Google’s bank account. All Google needs to do is let time pass; let people keep on searching and searching and searching for whatever weird and wonderful thing they want and the money will come flooding in. How much does Google get for the billions of clicks on its natural listings? Exactly £0.00. PPC is a massive source of revenue for Google and the omnipotent company will never let PPC die. It would be like Microsoft announcing that it is dropping Windows to focus on selling secret sauce for hamburgers.
So why do PPC Account Managers get all the girls, Calvin Harris style? I can think of several reasons right off the bat why SEO Programmers are dateless on prom night:
1. No control over which page people will land on when they click on organic links.
2. The possibility of suddenly disappearing off the first page of the search results because Google have changed their algorithm without warning.
3. If you are a local business, such as a florist or a B&B, you can’t exclusively advertise to a precise geographical area with SEO. Unless you pick location specific keywords to SEO, such as “Blackpool B&B”, it’s all/google.co.uk or nothing for generic keywords.
4. With PPC, you can use ad scheduling to run your advertising exactly when you want to. If don’t offer a service at weekends, for example, you cannot switch off your SEO listings on a Saturday and Sunday. In this instance, browser after browser will see your natural listings at the weekend and you could lose a lot of annoyed customers as they try to call an empty office. With PPC, you could simply pause the campaign at the weekend.
5. Unfortunately, you can’t add specific negative keywords to an SEO campaign, meaning your organic listings may appear for unrelated searches. If people enquire about something you don’t offer, it could waste the time for your employees.
6. You cannot pause an SEO campaign. If you are overloaded with enquiries from your PPC campaign, you can pause everything at the click on a button and stop all ads while you deal with the backlog. With SEO, your natural listings never disappear, meaning you will have to turn away customers, which is obviously bad for your brand.
7. The time it takes to achieve listings is another downside. If you want to show an ad for a new product/service or for a time sensitive promotion, it takes about 2 minutes to set this up on PPC and get an ad live … whereas, with SEO, first page listings usually take months and, even then, there are no cast-iron guarantees.
For me, however, there is a broader flaw in the monetization of what was once all about providing information for free and finding people what they were searching for. As SEO becomes big business, the bedrock on which Google was built – relevancy – is gradually being undermined. The most relevant websites to the user’s search query no longer saturate the first page of the search results – it is the websites with the most money; it is the websites who can buy the best SEO Programmers. And invariably, the companies who own these websites are all about profit maximisation; they are not interested in providing information for free. They are businesses and, as businesses, they are interested in one thing and one thing only: the bottom line. Along with everything else they do, their SEO must make money, not be informative. Therefore, as SEO slowly replaces its principles with ££££ and its values with $$$$, it is slowly shooting itself in the foot.
This said, PPC is all about making money, too – money for Google and money for the advertiser. So, as SEO sells it soul and slowly evolves into something that Gordon ‘Greed Is Good’ Gekko would love, maybe PPC and SEO have more in common than the cats and kittens in our office think!
