Shoppers distrust sponsored search results. Oh, really?
“The 2007 Search Attitudes Report, commissioned by search marketing firm Tamar, indicates that consumers lack trust in paid search and are turning overwhelmingly to natural search results when making purchase decisions.
2007 Search Attitudes Report,” says a report on Netimperative (emphasis mine).
If that were indeed the case, how does one explain the continuing growth of paid search? It is fairly obvious that more advertisers seem to be channeling money into paid search now more than ever, and this trend cannot be out of sync with the search user’s behaviour. Such a statement makes me sceptical and distrust the study that is being reported; particularly since we rely on paid search marketing to a great extent for our own business.
Two aspects of the study might still be of interest to affiliate marketers: (a) consumers depend natural search results more — I think this is more due to where/ how the results appear rather than any distrust in paid search results and (b) consumers are influenced by negative views appearing in search results.
For a), the obvious action for affiliates is to put more effort in getting organic search traffic; but that decision depends on the affiliates’ overall marketing strategy and priorities. For far too many affiliates, depending on the search engine’s algorithms to drive traffic may be too much of a long wait. Also, being used to absolutely measurable results, many affiliates do not like the “cost of uncertainty” associated with organic search traffic and choose to ignore this option altogether (despite the knowledge that SEO will have “long-term” benefits).
Affiliates as agents of online reputation management
There is an indirect (”rather convoluted) benefit of affiliates doing more with their SEO efforts—- assuming the affiliate sites do begin to get visibilty, they are decreasing the probability of customers getting influenced by the “negative publicty”. In fact, committed affiliates are potentially a powerful tool for a merchant’s “online reputation management”, which is certainly not easy to control. While merchants will have to focus on their end-users to ensure a great reputation, affiliates have a part to play in building and projecting that reputation— be it by creating excellent content, generating their own “user-generated” content or using techinques like blogging.
