eBay study warns search ads have ‘no measurable benefit
The Guardian did a story on the efficacy of paid search based on a study conducted by eBay
From the article:
Customers are just as likely to click on natural search results as paid ads, a US study has found, raising questions about the efficacy of the multi-billion dollar search advertising market.
The researchers found that most search adverts on most search terms had very little affect on sales at all – and warn that the medium may be “beyond the peak of its efficacy.”
Many companies buy adverts on searches for their brand. eBay, for instance, may buy adverts on searches for the term “eBay”, as well as for terms such as “eBay shoes”. But confirming what customers have long suspected, those adverts do little other than encourage users to click on the advert where they would otherwise have clicked on the normal search result to the same site.
“The results show that almost all of the forgone click traffic and attributed sales were captured by natural search,” the researchers found.
Read the full article here
83 comments with the general consensus that none of the commenters ever click ads and they believe no one ever does or has. The billions of dollars in Google’s bank account may say otherwise.
One commenter did point out a possible eBay agenda, Interesting eBay are currently recovering from a manual penalty from Google for poor practice on the organic front: http://searchengineland.com/google-hits-ebay-manual-penalty-search-results-192454
I would say eBay ads suck they are not for anything particular, they run the cheapest priced ads they can and a lot of times show up for things that are not relevant to them and their sellers.
