Google Ad Ban Having No Effect on eBay’s Traffic
Last week, I posted a story about the little spat that Google and eBay were having, well eBay followed through on their threat and pulled all of their PPC (Pay per click) or sponsored links off of Google. Before this, eBay was one of Google’s largest PPC spenders. Now what is incredibly interesting is this article in the New York Post that states based on Hitwise numbers, not only has eBay’s traffic numbers not decreased, but they actually slightly increased since the PPC ban began!
According to Bill Trancer, GM of Hitwise, “One reason appears to be that much of the traffic that goes to eBay from Google comes from people performing free searches rather than clicking on the paid search ads.”
This brings up a number of questions and issues for other large ecommerce web players. What I have believed for a very long time is that PPC is a short term solution to gain visibility in the search engines, but long term, if you have a large enough site and do the basic search engine optimization techniques that everyone should do, large web sites will gain a great deal more visibility and traffic from natural search results. More importantly, those natural search results are free so they have a much higher ROI than the paid links.
I also believe for large players like eBay and other big e-tailers, having PPC links actually is hurting them as users will click on a paid link instead of their natural link just a couple of places down on the page. Let’s also not forget that Google has been the king of the mountain for PPC for a very long time and if these traffic and revenue numbers do not decline for eBay, it could seriously put into question whether Google’s PPC is really worth the amount of money companies are paying.
This might be a good thing for everyone as I think all companies just like people need a humbling experience to bring them back to earth and make them realize no-one is invincible including Google.
Technorati Tags: Google, eBay, PPC, Pay per click, New York Post, Hitwise, ecommerce, ROI, e-tailers
Sure, eBay is punishing Google for its plans to crash the eBay user’s conference in Boston, but I suspect that it may have been waiting for an excuse to do this “experiment”.
Vince – I think you are right on the money. And as I said, if eBay’s traffic and revenue numbers do not take a dip, that brings up a load of possible issues for Google. Thanks for the comment.
It’s nice to see one aspect of Google’s all-powerful business being questioned. I’ve used Google PPC when I worked in marketing for large corporations, and Google’s “algorithm” seemed to negatively affect results. I would not be surprised if eBay proves PPC is not worth the time or money in terms of driving sales and increasing ROI.
Nice blog, I will be coming back to see what else you have for me.