I came across an interesting article the other day about the shift from organic clicks in Google to paid clicks. The total number of clicks on a page is dropping significantly, both on desktop and mobile devices. While clicks on paid ads are actually increasing. This is a big change in Google!
Research shows that organic CTR fell 25% on desktop and 55% on mobile, compared to 2015.
The decline on mobile is especially pertinent because mobile traffic has actually increased tremendously over the past two years.
Of course, this data does not apply to all Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). The study (from MOZ.com) looked at searches focused on e-commerce. They collected display, click and ranking data from Search Console and analyzed and compared it.
An interesting detail from this study: the paid ads don't get all the clicks that the organic search results don't. Besides a small number of people who clicked beyond the first search results, there was a surprising number who didn't click at all.
Possible causes we can think of for this change are:
Over the last year, we saw more and more Google Shopping results appear in searches. This growth has been tracked in Stat Search Analytics for 25,000 keywords tracked daily on mobile and desktop. Google Shopping's overall market share has increased nearly 60% over the past year.
In addition, we often see four PPC ads appear for a typical non-branded advertising term next to the Google Shopping results.
And with the expanded size of ads on mobile devices, almost none of the searches show anything but ads without scrolling.
The image below shows the steady growth of ad space on desktop. You can see here a shift from five organic search results to one, before scrolling. In recent years, we have seen this growth explode on mobile devices as well.
As ads grew, so did labeling. Research in 2015 by Ofcom, found that half of adults do not recognize an ad in Google. And this is true for 70% of teenagers.
Since then, labeling has become even less visible. Previously, ads were still marked with a large colored block, clearly separating them from the organic results.
2000 - Dark background behind ads
2010 - A slightly lighter background around the ads
2014 - No more background, but a yellow block to label the ads (and they suddenly take up more space):
2017 - The yellow block is replaced by a green one, which is the same color as the url (and the ads get even more space).
2017 - The green block is replaced by a transparent block with a thin green line the same color as the url.
The good news is that you are not the only one affected by this change, but everyone in e-commerce. Other good news is that all the "search clicks" are still happening. The number of users has not decreased. With the increase in the number of searches each year, you probably won't see a big reduction in organic traffic. This will go in small bits.
The bad news is, like your competitors, it will cost you more money to maintain the same share of search traffic.
A good search engine strategy always includes a combination of organic search, paid search and PLA. Websites that are optimized for all search channels are already well positioned to retain search traffic regardless of ad changes in SERPs: if SEO growth slows down, PLA and paid search growth will accelerate.
As one shrinks, the other grows....
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