News Source: http://www.nvisolutions.com
Published: Mar 22, 2009 - 03:22 pm
Story Found By: nightcrawl 1058 Days ago
Category: PPC
15 Comments
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News Source: http://www.nvisolutions.com
Published: Mar 22, 2009 - 03:22 pm
Story Found By: nightcrawl 1058 Days ago
Category: PPC
15 Comments
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Comments
The only thing left to do is real benchmarking with 6 digits campaigns - I am not sure Google would appreciate very serious studies confirming those facts and coming out of that kind of reflexion :O
Hey Wiep. Just letting you know that we don’t have any suck puppet accounts - there is 45 employees at NVI and 20-25 of them have a sphinn account, so it’s normal to get 10-15 votes because everyone reads our blog at www.nvisolutions.com/blog. Sorry if you think we are cheeeeter’s -_-PS: We will try to vote from home, avoiding such issues :D
@Wiep - Second Guillaume’s point. I chat w skillful and sammy on twitter, n believe nightcrawl is also a recent hire.
@GuillaumeOk just to put my moderator hat on for a sec. You do have to be careful in that situation, where you have a large number of people working in your company. As most people know, stories go hot here with 23 votes so a company of 45 employees is enough to push any story there. You don’t seem to see that as sockpuppets. Fair enough but it could be seen as a manipulation of the system, especially if those users fail to participate in the community and only rally to vote on your stories. Even though there are real people behind the acounts, the effect can be the same as a sockpuppet network. Be responsible and ensure that you are not encouraging your employees to only vote on your own material. If that is their only participation in Sphinn you will soon find that backfiring on you.
@Guillaume (and Gab): I was actually planning on leaving a comment to explain my Desphinn (you can only leave 200 chars at a Desphinn), but got distracted somehow and forgot.The reason why I Desphunn was a combination of factors: a few sockpuppet accounts, several folks from the same company, 15 Sphinns in an hour and a half and the current threshold of just 23 Sphinns. I did notice that several of the accounts that voted for the article were somehow connected to NVI. A few others looked like sockpuppets, but these accounts seem to have disappeared now (the article was at 15 Sphinns earlier).Like Nick said, while you may not see this as sockpuppeting or cheating the system, others may do so. At least I did...
@Guillaume<div></div><div>Accounts that exist for the sole purpose of upvoting a specific user or site’s stories are sockpuppets. The votes that came from within the company all fit that profile and I terminated several of the accounts for that reason. </div><div></div><div>We encourage large companies to have many people within them involved at Sphinn - but that means really involved - in other stories, in commenting, in submitting non-company material, etc. Logging in every couple of weeks to vote up in house stories - that’s not being involved in the community, that’s being a sockpuppet.</div><div></div>
@Wiep / @Michelle: Thanks guys - we will make sure only frequent users of sphinn end up voting for the stories so this won’t happen again... I also found out what triggered the 15 votes in 30 minutes (a global email to the company about our newly published article!)++
And now back to the comments about the actual article ;-) We manage a huge number of small client PPC / organic accounts, and a few large. Our largest spends over $200k a year on PPC and pays us six figures for our organic work and AdWords PPC management. This very issue was one I was curious about so I did some experimenting last year. I don’t have the data with me and thus can’t show hard statistics - can only talk anecdotally as a result. What we did boiled down to a similar test, but over a three month period. In that time, we turned on and off different keyword group campaigns each month. What we found was that we actually had more people clicking on the organic listings when we ran any of the PPC campaigns. My assumption was that some people who saw the AdWords accounts AND the organics in the top organic slots must have felt psycologically more confident that our client was legit or whatever - and thus chose to click on the organic links.. A couple months later, Andy Cotton, the Senior Sales Manager for Western US at Yahoo Search Marketing was in town for Ad:Tech and paid us a visit (at the time our client was spending big $ at YSM as well). So I asked Andy his opinion and he said that he was getting similar reports from tests and surveys. that it’s a trustworthiness thing believe it or not. Well, I don’t know the psyhology behind it nor what would happen for other clients in other markets. But it was a pretty amazing experience.
@AlanBleiweiss Excellent point, if there is no cannibalisation but more people clicking on your organic ranking, you than know that your PPC campaign is affecting positively the ROI of the organic campaign on some keywords. So you have to take that in account when calculating the ROI of the PPC campaign. Always be testing crucial informations like that is a must.
I was going to desphinn this - but it brings up a point that needs to be addressed. <div></div><div>I’m a paid search professional that works at an SEO-heavy firm. We all agree here at our company, SEOs and SEMs alike, that running paid and organic listings in tandem does nothing but help exposure.<div></div><div>I agree with AlanBleiweiss. It definitely improves a searchers confidence in you if they see your name multiple times on the results page.</div><div></div><div>Secondly, buying your own brand name or most relevant terms to your business is most always gonna be insanely cheaper for you than it will be for a competitor. Your quality scores will be higher, your clickthroughs will be higher, and your costs will be lower.</div><div></div><div>Remember, the point is to get people to your site and to take an action. Is that action worth something to you? How much is it worth? The answer to those two questions will usually outweigh whether you obtain that searcher for free through Organic, or very inexpensively through PPC.</div></div>
It really worth a Sphinn, and as @Gab pointed out, I’m linked to Guillaume but not working with him at this point. I’m was very confortable to sphinn that story as I’m again suckpuppets.... anyway ;)for the article, its an interesting test with number to back up the PPC cannibalization that can occur and after that its up to you to explain it and go for it in sometimes when needed...
Wiep, Michelle, good points. Hadn’t seen it that way, nor checked NVI’s accounts previous participation. You’re right in this :).
when it involves your brand name, i would rather prevent the customer from clicking on a competitors ad.
I think the "cannibalization" theory is based on some assumptions about users that do not seem to be backed up by those that really try to test this idea.But most the evidence so far is anecdotal.I know over ther years I have gone from considering branding PPC dollars to be the last spent to thinking they often should be the highest priority dollars spent.There is only so much space on a SERP page.Protect your Brand or that space will be filled by a competitor.Brand search terms are also great for testing ad copy and landing pages.
Using sock puppet accounts is lame. (extra characters for 50 chars limit)