Incremental Clicks Impact Of Search Advertising
Venue
Google, Inc. (2011)
Publication Year
2011
Authors
David Chan, Yuan Yuan, Jim Koehler, Deepak Kumar
BibTeX
Abstract
Advertisers often wonder whether search ads cannibalize their organic traffic. In
other words, if search ads were paused, would clicks on organic results increase,
and make up for the loss in paid traffic? Google statisticians recently ran over
400 studies on paused accounts to answer this question. In what we call “Search Ads
Pause Studies”, our group of researchers observed organic click volume in the
absence of search ads. Then they built a statistical model to predict the click
volume for given levels of ad spend using spend and organic impression volume as
predictors. These models generated estimates for the incremental clicks
attributable to search ads (IAC), or in other words, the percentage of paid clicks
that are not made up for by organic clicks when search ads are paused. The results
were surprising. On average, the incremental ad clicks percentage across verticals
is 89%. This means that a full 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not
replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This number was consistently high
across verticals.
