Paid Ads VS Organic Search: Which One Tends To Attract Reader’s Eyes

Paid Ads VS Organic Search

The debate taking “Paid Ads VS organic search: which one tends to attract readers eyes” has always been a dilemma for marketers and businesses. Though, the prime goal of both the mediums is to get more traffic and sales in return to the investment. Taking the debate, businesses and marketers have been divided into two groups. Naturally, one group is advocating the Paid Ads and the second group is advocating the organic search.

Let’s take this debate from the other end, the customer end, why? The chances to spread a product and/or a service will become least if a business and/or a marketer doesn’t understand the needs and wants of the market. Understanding the expectation of the targeted customers is a vital thing for the businesses as well as the marketers. If all the efforts are designed to capture the eyeball of the readers and/or true customers of your business, the chances are high to generate a lead and then to close it as a customer. Once you have researched your market well enough you can better choose between Paid Ads vs. Organic search.

To take a better insight of the matter, GFK’s user experience team (former User Centric) conducted a research to find either Paid Ads capture more eyeballs or the organic search results. More than 13,000 market research experts combine their passion with GFK’s long-standing data science experience. This allows GFK to deliver vital global insights matched with local market intelligence from more than 100 countries.

According to the study, Google’s top sponsored results get more attention than of Bing’s. As approximately 90% of participants looked at the sponsored results above the organic results in each search task. It is reported in the study that the participants spent more time looking at the top sponsored results area on Google, on an average 2.8 sec per search task, than on Bing where the average time spent was 1.9 sec.

Whereas for the right side sponsored links, only 28% of participants looked at Google and 21% on Bing. For the hit rate on the right side sponsored Ads, it is noted that only 21% hit on Google and 42% on Bing. Overall time spent looking on the right-hand side Ads is reported 4.4 sec on Google and 3.0 sec on Bing.

It is significant to note that 100% of participants looked at the organic search results in each search. According to the original study, participants spent 7.1 sec on Google and 7.3 sec on Bing for looking at the organic results. The gaze time did not differ between the two search engines as well. The average time spent on organic results was much longer on Google, 14.7sec, in compare to Bing, 10.7 sec.

The GFK’s study was to track the hit rate on all the areas available for both the search engines, Google and Bing. It can be clearly seen in the study that regardless of the search engine the area which is gazed, hit and spent time on is the middle column. The right column attracts eye-ball of the least. The middle column is consist of two parts; one is the Ad area and the rest is the organic result area.

Marketing is all about creating more attention. To marketers and businesses, it is vital to winning the Ad space above organic search. Why? Because this is the area where the hit rate was more than three times higher and gaze time more than five times longer than on the sponsored links on the right.

As of study 100% participants spent more time while gazing and hitting the organic search, marketers and businesses should also spend their efforts to win space in the organic area. While having the concept of landing pages for the particular keyword will actually enhance the amount of information around the keyword. Having a precise information about a product and/or service will increase the chances to convert a visitor to lead.