Rehan - 4:40 pm on Apr 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

There's something that I've seen one online retailer do that's either clever or stupid; I'm not sure which it is... For a specific keyword combo that includes their business name and a product category (kind of like "zappos shoes") they have the top 4 organic results as well as the only ad above the SERPs. But the ad is for a very obscure product that nobody would be interested in.

So they are either:

1) having their potential customers click on the ad and go to a useless page, from which they would to click again once or twice to get to the page they actually wanted...stupid because it's a bad user experience.

or

2) getting a relatively lower CTR on the ad and relatively higher CTR on the organic results because the searchers see the useless ad, skip over it, and then click on the organic result...clever because they reduce their PPC costs.