I realize there's a benefit to running Adwords even on a page where you are listed in the SERPs but does anybody have experience with whether it's useful to get the PPC listing on top vs the side in that situation?
If we were #3 or worse on the page, we would certainly try for the top of page PPC listing. However, being #1, the two listings are basically sitting on top of each other.
I go with the philosophy of grabbing as many eye balls and traffic possible, especially as my ads are geo targetted to only my country.
This funny side effect of this is you will see high bid prices even for your <sitename>!.
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.
In Adword i specifically seen this after the latest QS update... If you rank #1 for a kw and if you try bidding for the same kw (same domain) the system discourage you with sky high min bids!.
In the QS Update thread i saw many posts complaining $5 min bids for even their <sitename.com>, so i assume this a widespread phenomenon.
Hmm, Maybe this is a intentional incentive mechanism by google to encourage variety in the SERPS!
Yes. We agree..
