No.18 PPC Listing beating No.1 Organic Listing

[internetheaven]

Our PPC campaign includes many broad matches that cover some of our organic good rankings too. But we are getting a 9% clickthough rate our our ad that is ranking 18+ (I checked Google and we are normally on page 2 or 3) for a certain term that we are ranking No.1 for in the organic listings.

Any explanation? The page title and the ad title are so closely matched we figure it can't be that. What would make someone crawl through 3 pages of organic and paid listings before clicking on our ad if what they were looking for was matched in the top organic listing on the first page?

[inbound]

It may be that 'Ave Pos' means you are #25 for generic queries but much higher up for more specific searches.

A simple way to check this is to visit the SERP url that people came from, with any luck you will see your adverts in better positions than your average. You should be analysing such data to identify terms of interest (both positive and negative).

[venrooy]

That still doesn't explain the discrepency. Usually a #1 in organic search will even beat out the #1 in ppc.

[eyeinthesky]

Click fraud :)

[Pengi]

Maybe you have particulary effective Ad text for a particular search

[idolw]

are you sure your meta description of the #1 organic page is correct?
maybe it is completely different from what user lookds for

[eWhisper]

How much of a difference in total traffic is there from the ad compared to the organic listing?

[Rehan]

The 9% CTR for the ad on the 2nd or 3rd page is based on the number of times the ad is seen, not the total number of searches performed for the keyword. So if someone performs the search and doesn't go to the 2nd or 3rd page of the results, it's not counted as an impression for your ad.

9% CTR is not at all unusual for an ad with good positioning, whether that's on the first page or subsequent pages.

[internetheaven]

Click fraud :)

That was obviously our first thought as a lot of these "adsense for search" affiliates generate auto-results pages and send traffic directly to each results page. (i.e. buy PPC ads to send traffic to page 1/2/3 etc. of their bespoke in-site search pages.)