
Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search? - Man_On_the_Moon
For example, go to google.com and type in: &quot;Squarespace&quot;. Squarespace has an ad at the top and then they are the first result. On the surface, this seems counter-intuitive because a user searching &#x27;squarespace&#x27; would likely choose the organic link anyway. This is very common. Why do companies do this? Is it a defense mechanism so other competitors do not win ad placements right above their organic search result?
======
calbear81
This study ([http://searchengineland.com/google-research-even-if-you-
rank...](http://searchengineland.com/google-research-even-if-you-
rank-1-organically-you-can-double-your-clicks-with-paid-search-116713)) is a
bit old and possibly biased (since sponsored by Google) but when I worked in
SEM the experience we had was the same which was the top organic position +
the top paid position netted overall more traffic to our site than with just
the organic position alone. The other considerations are:

1) Brand SEM terms are cheap - if you own the brand, especially something like
Squarespace, your ad will have a high quality score and will thus pay a much
lower CPC than a competitor trying to vie for eyeballs with your brand name as
a keyword. This means that brand terms generally are pretty cheap to buy.

2) Real estate ownership - The more real estate on the page you own the more
click share you will get. This will keep other organic listings from getting
click share which may mean your competitors will get less traffic off of
searches for you.

3) Control over message - Ads provide a high degree of creative control which
means you can change the copy and also add on Ad Extensions like sitelinks,
app download buttons, "click to call" buttons, etc. These are all things that
are harder to control on your organic listing.

~~~
davemel37
This reflects the core argument to do this...but the truth is more subtle.
Agencies and in house SEM teams are inherently biased to want to spend on
brand terms because a) they can attribute more sales to their channel and b)
Justify more spend which equals more revenue for most agencies...

I am not discounting the validity of the argument to bid on brand terms and I
bid on brand terms for most of my clients...but I always disclose this
inherent bias before making a recommendation...

In truth, every brand should test for themselves how it impacts their bottom
line and if protecting their brand is worth the spend...

\------ The cynical voice in my head thinks that most digital advertising
today is really ad tech companies hijacking revenue that brands earned
already...and if not for competitors using that same tech, no one really needs
it... (i.e. remarketing, custom audiences, branded search, first party data,
etc...)

In reality, I actively spend my clients money on these tactics and
congratulate myself on the results I generate for them... but in the back of
my mind I am waiting for the ad tech bubble to burst and media companies
disappearing and being replaced by branded content, content marketing, etc...

Edit:spelling

~~~
madaxe_again
It's (a) all the way down. The expression is robbing Peter to pay Paul - we've
even tested it - while running ads on branded keywords does increase clicks,
it increases the CPA from zero to potentially pricey. The net benefit is so-
so, and if the client doesn't understand that they're cannibalising their
organic traffic you have a problem - I.e. 99% of the time.

The only reason I've ever witnessed is SEO/M ego rubbing, and the
conversations usually go:

"we are spending more than our monthly revenue on brand ppc ads!"

"But you cover the entire first page of Google for your terms, branded and
product. Turn the ads off."

"But all our traffic cones through the ads!"

"That's because you're swamping your organic terms."

"Oh gee, I don't know, worm-tongue SEO/M-master, what do I do?"

"Spend more money with my PPC agency! We know more about web development then
web developers, we studied drama and literature. And we have a certificate
from google saying we're good webmasters. Do your development agency?"

~~~
blahi
If you are so sure of yourself, model it.

[http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2016/04/21/compare-actual-
vs...](http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2016/04/21/compare-actual-vs-
predictive-data-with-ga-causalimpact/)

[https://google.github.io/CausalImpact/CausalImpact.html](https://google.github.io/CausalImpact/CausalImpact.html)

Because some of the people who studied marketing did not sleep through their
econometric classes.

------
pakitan
To add some anecdotal data, even when our company was at #1 for our main
search phrase and when there were fewer PPC competitors, we were still getting
more traffic with PPC + organic, rather than leaving it just to the organic
listing. It's like there were 2 different sets of people - those who tend to
click on ads and those who tend to click on organic results. And you want
both. That was quite a long time ago. Nowadays, for our main search phrase,
there are 4 PPC ads at this time. And Google is now blending ads much better
with the organic results, they are barely distinguishable to the untrained
eye. Being #1 organic result doesn't bring you that much benefit in that
setup, you're actually being #5 overall - barely visible.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
IOW: "Nice business you have here, it would be a shame if something happened
to it ..."

------
fragsworth
My experience with Google ads was that it is very easy to accidentally get
them to display your ad in this way, without you knowing it.

You choose a list of terms you want to show your ad in, but by default Google
will also put your ad up in "related" searches. If your company or product is
already popular enough, it's likely to end up in the related searches for the
terms you chose.

This cost me quite a bit of money before I found out I was wasting money on
these ads by accident.

~~~
davemel37
> by default Google will also put your ad up in "related" searches.

I don't mean to be harsh, but you shouldn't be spending money on search
advertising without taking the 2 minutes to understand match types. There is
no default other than showing you very closely related variant matching (i.e.
plural to singular)...

Yes, if you run broad match keywords and dont use negatives, you run the risk
of wasting lots of money...but it's hardly a default setting.

~~~
kgwgk
I think he means related searches as in [http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/g...](http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/google-related-searches-competitors.png)

If I understand his comment, if you select the term "sweatshirt" your add is
also displayed when people search "American Eagle," and that may be yourself
and you're wasting money.

~~~
davemel37
He was referring to running broad match keywords by accident...My point was
that its reckless to advertise without understanding match types... Google
gives you nearly complete control over which terms they show you on using
keyword match types and negative keywords...No one should be advertising with
Google without understanding this.

[https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497836?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497836?hl=en)

~~~
t4nkd
I wish you could try to frame your criticism in a more engaging and friendly
way. In my opinion, it's exactly this kind of absolutist reasoning that seems
to be killing community and conversation.

Of course he and many others can advertise on Google without understanding
match types. The point of the service provided by Google is that it's on the
whole, significantly easier than "traditional" ad buying. Regardless of the
repercussions, AdSense _let_ him buy ads without that understanding.

With this kind of fervor, I have to presume you're either genuinely very, very
bad at providing people with advice or, what I presume to be the case, angry
or pessimistic about something else entirely.

Frankly I think you owe the comment an apology for your tone regardless of the
validity of your opinion on what training ought to be necessary before using a
particular web app.

~~~
davemel37
I somewhat agree with your point about the tone. I will apologize after
writing this.

(Edit: Your post has me confused because you start off talking about tone and
than you fail to take your own advice about reasonable discourse.)

Your assumptions however are way off...I would never criticize someone for
something remotely excusable, but advertising on Google without taking 2
minutes or less to learn something as fundamental as match types is about as
reckless as buying a rolex on the streets from a guy on a manhattan street
corner and than feeling ripped off...Some things, like match types, fit into
the category of reckless despite how easy you want to think running Adwords
is.

My frustration is that so many people waste so much money on digital
advertising because "they think they can do it themselves."

This specific guy was sharing advice warning people about adwords wasting his
money. Adwords didnt waste him a penny, his unwillingness to do less than 2
minutes of preperation or asking a pro led to that...

Even with over a decade experience, I still learn new things about Adwords
almost daily...The idea that people think that its simple and they can run it
themselves is frustrating, but to not even know about match types, I cant
think of any excuse that justifies it short of arrogance and/or laziness.

Adwords is an auction. When my competitors choose to waste money, My costs get
driven up. It hurts everyone but Google...so take the 2 seconds to read up on
how to do it or dont complain and tell the world it doesnt work.

Or ask me, Im happy to help with basic strategy for free, its in my best
interest for my competitors to run advertising that is accountable to a bottom
line and thay doesnt compete in irrelevant query auctions.

~~~
fragsworth
> "I cant think of any excuse that justifies it short of arrogance and/or
> laziness."

You're not very nice, calling me arrogant and/or lazy.

It was simply a false assumption that the matching would be strict by default.
And possibly a mistake that a lot of people are making, considering all the
companies that are advertising for themselves.

~~~
davemel37
I'm sorry. It was wrong to call you arrogant or lazy and I apologize.

You might be right about other companies making those same assumptions...I
would love to understand more about their thought process. When you started
with adwords, did you consider hiring a pro or run a few searches for beginner
tips or did you just follow the onboarding to get started? I am not asking to
prove a point, I am asking to get an idea about what a newbie might assume
when getting started with Adwords.

I would never try to fix my cars engine on my own, nor would I fix my sewer
line. I would probably atleast watch a youtube video before changing my
oil...I genuinely want to understand what people think when they assume they
can run adwords on their own without researching how to do it effectively?

------
bruceb
I attended a talk by Nordstrom's SEO team and one of their findings was people
who click on the top ads spend more than people who click on non ads links.
They seemed to think the paid search results might align closer to what the
buyer was looking for.

That being said they were not 100% sure.

~~~
rokhayakebe
_people who click on the top ads spend more_

Probably because they are less web savvy and less aware of the options they
have.

~~~
totalZero
I don't see why clicking the ad makes you less web savvy. You're not the one
paying for it.

As an alternative, perhaps people who click the top ad are pressed for time,
which is often the case with high income individuals.

~~~
user5994461
>>> I don't see why clicking the ad makes you less web savvy.

Web Savyy people have AdBlockers. It's the first thing to install right after
the operating system itself.

Clicking the ad means you don't have an AdBlocker, therefore you are not web
savyy.

~~~
totalZero
...

We're talking about ads in Google search results, right? Not banner ads? Am I
missing something??

~~~
user5994461
Yes we're talking about ads in Google search results. They are blocked by
adblockers.

(Well, except the official flavour of AdBlock Plus, which was paid a shitton
of money by Google to stop blacklisting them :D)

~~~
totalZero
I use ghostery...not exactly an ad blocker but it blocks most ads. I guess it
spares the Google search text ads.

------
tf2manu994
Yep. It's a defense mechanism.

Also prevents someone from buying an ad for Squarespace.co or some other
domain for a phishing site, which could result in bad press from a
""""hack"""" (note the use of quotes, it's not hacking.)

~~~
withdavidli
This happened with torrenting sites and other free software. Top results were
ads that charged people money.

------
slap_shot
As others have already explained, it is done to prevent competing services
from achieving the number one spot for your search result.

There is a very cool and informative video from Google that shows what goes
into bidding for and awarding the ads that are shown. I had truly encourage
you watch this:

[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PjOHTFRaBWA](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PjOHTFRaBWA)

------
gleb
I'll add one more - analytics. It's the only way to get accurate impression
numbers. Which is a useful thing to trend for brand keywords.

~~~
gk1
What's wrong with impression numbers from Google Search Console? They're free.

~~~
angry-hacker
Only very limited 3 months of worth data. Everything costs nowadays when it
comes to Google. And Facebook.

------
jmatthews
I got in to a debate with my business partner about this very subject. It
turns out non-technical people tend not to distinguish between organic results
and paid results. For example, he personally clicks our brand based ad instead
of our organic result when he googles us. I had to explain that we were
spending money every time he did that.

------
47
If you don't advertise on your brand keywords, your competitor will. We spend
quiet a lot on our brand keywords to avoid competitor siphoning off our brand
traffic.

~~~
dvirsky
Isn't this trademark violation? I'm not from the US, but years ago I used to
work for a local index-style search engine (before Google ate everyone's
meal), and IIRC we consulted our lawyers and came to the conclusion that this
is not legal, and we didn't sell these sort of ads.

~~~
davemel37
[https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en)

------
alkjshdkfjasdf
I am a little late to the party, but want to address one topic that I didn't
see mentioned below.

One answer to your question is "volume", with a related cause of personal
incentives.

You're getting those clicks for free and buying ads on branded terms is just
cannibalizing your organic results. Now, instead of $500 per day, you want to
scale your campaign to $5,000 per day.

How do you do that? Your return will be less efficient as you seek volume, but
you need to spend the $5,000 as effectively as you can.

You (or the agency) look better / get paid more when they're able to spend
with a better return. It's probably not your department, or your KPI, what the
organic SEO is like. So if you cannibalize some conversions from organic in
the SEM attempt to spend the budget and raise conversions, you're probably
happy, because you're hitting KPIs that matter to you.

It would take a wise leader to recognize what is happening. Even then, they
might decide that although the efficiency of the overall SEO/SEM spend is
lowered, it provides more volume. If your company is focused on growth, they
may prefer volume over efficiency.

It's rational, once you try to see the larger context in which these decisions
are made w/in a company. (It also has it's drawbacks)

------
sfifs
Yes - It is mainly so that a competitor doesn't show up above your organic
search results by buying your keywords and it adds another line item for your
brand.

------
mcbailey
A group of economists at Ebay ran a series of experiments to measure the value
or promoted links when the brand already own the top organic link
[http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/Tadelis.pdf](http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/Tadelis.pdf)

They find no measurable short term benefit to purchasing the "Ebay" keyword on
sales.

~~~
blahi
Yeah, ask them how they felt about it when they turned adwords off.

------
shostack
I actually overlap with SquareSpace on non branded terms in some areas and
helped lead the search group at a top search agency in my last job. Not
tooting my horn, just sharing my credentials since these threads inevitably
have lots of uninformed rants and assumptions.

Many brands could see a lift from bidding on brand terms not just in click
volume from covering more of the SERPs but particularly conversion rates from
controlling one of the most prominent placements of your brand online.

Ad extensions can do wonders for many, and Google didn't fully let you control
messaging for your homepage like you can with brand term ads.

Beyond that there are a few other really compelling reasons that make it a no
brainer in many cases.

\- Control the landing page URL, particularly for setting parameters or a/b
testing

\- Controlling site link messaging and URLs to help searchers self select a
more relevant experience, particularly if you have multiple audiences

\- Potentially a slight boost to account level quality score (I've seen mixed
data on this)

\- I don't see this mentioned enough, but you can get solid organic query
volume data in AdWords now

\- Super valuable insight into the raw queries. Are people searching for "your
brand vs new competitor brand?" Are they searching around some horrible PR
that you were unaware of? Maybe they are looking to see if you sell a product
and if you don't you should consider it. With secure search everywhere now,
this is arguably one of your best data sources for these sorts of insights

For the pennies per click you pay it is absolutely worth it in many cases. If
you have doubts, Google just released their data driven attribution model in
AdWords, which, among others, can help inform whether you are giving too much
credit to them (although this can be hard to actually determine).

For most companies I'd fully educate on the pros and cons and recommend trying
them before making uninformed assumptions. At this point, I typically default
to enabling them fwiw.

------
LyalinDotCom
Marketers often work with middle man companies to create the ads, you'd be
surprised I think if you heard how many times the ad owner never even looks at
the results of how it looks to customers.

But also lots of the other reasons posted here are very true too.

~~~
davemel37
SERIOUSLY???? I have to beg my clients to stop googling themselves!!!

In all seriousness, clients obsess about their ads and how it appears way more
than the agencies do...They often don't realize that it can hurt their CTR,
their quality scores, and pollute the data used to measure results... Google
built an ad preview tool for this very reason.

~~~
vram22
How does it hurt and pollute? New to this.

~~~
davemel37
A big factor in how much you pay for every click is quality score. The likely
biggest factor in quality score is your relative click through rate for the
position (i.e. Google wants to show the ad that gets clicked more because it
makes them more revenue, if you get clicked 10% of the time for a keyword in
position 2 and your competitor gets clicked 8% of the time, Google wants to
show your ad and even gives you a discount of sorts on the click via higher
quality score.)

So, if you google your keywords to see how your ad appears, you have 2
choices. Click on your ad, which will cost you money or dont click and lower
your click through rate which can lower your quality score, especially if you
do it often.

The issue of polluting data is that now your agency or whoever is managing
your SEM sees either a lower click through rate if your dont click or a lower
conversion rate if you do click and will make optimization decisions without
knowing how many searches were you.

Google has an ad preview tool in Adwords to let you check without impacting
your data.

In the greater scheme of things, if its a high volume query, the harm is
minimal, but if its a high value term with low search volume (i.e. a big
ticket local service) it can really hurt you.

~~~
vram22
Getting it now, thanks. This field is deep.

------
griffinmichl
Because if they don't their competitors will.

------
f_allwein
Side question: would you click on the ad or on the organic search result? Why?

~~~
dasmoth
Organic, always. No desire to encourage advertising.

(Yes, I'd be willing to pay a modest subscription if Google got out of the
advertising business. No, I doubt this pledge will ever be put to the test...)

~~~
paulcole
Here you go:

[https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/](https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/)

Please let us know the amount you contributed.

~~~
dasmoth
"Not yet available in your country". (Although there's a "waitlist" button now
which I don't remember from when this first appeared, so thanks for getting me
to take another look).

Note, also, that "fewer adverts" isn't the same as "Google out of the
advertising business"! Although, in practice, I probably _would_ pay for the
former as well if it were an option.

------
symbolepro
Localization is also one of the reasons. For eg., I live in japan and when I
search for amazon in google, the organic result is .com but the top ad link is
.co.jp. And I always click the ad link.

------
gsylvie
It increases the clickable area that will result in a visit to your site, it
blocks others from taking up any of that critical real estate (via ads or
organic rank), and like others have said, it's probably relatively cheap for
the brand owner to bid on their own brand.

I think increasing the clickable area is pretty important, especially with
mobile users.

And customers, since they know it's an ad, might be nice and click on the
organic link instead. :-)

------
freyir
If they didn't buy the ad, someone else's ad would be at the top. Many people
don't distinguish between the top search result and the ad.

------
douche
Marketers and ad reps are very good at rationalizing and justifying their
existence.

As someone else mentioned down thread, I'm happy to reward those who
cannibalize their organic results and help ensure that their adwords budget
doesn't go unused...

------
known
I think to circumvent
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb)

------
garyadamshannon
Brand reinforcement. The more you see it, the more you know it, the more
likely you are to trust / use the brand. It's simple really.

------
dccoolgai
Because the ad is the first search result. We don't even really care that much
anymore how our "organic" results play out.

------
FollowSteph3
Because competitors will big on your company name and you want to appear
before them in the search results.

------
NumberCruncher
Googling in Munich (logged in in Chrome) for squarespace I get an ad for
siteground.com.

~~~
wysiwylwysiwyl
Googling "squarespace -squarespace" I get the ad for squarespace without
competing ads or organics.

