Ginny Marvin reports on interesting news from Bing over at Search Engine Land:

In other words, Bing ran a study looking at companies that ranked well in organic search that ran ads targeting their brand names and other companies that ranked well in organic search but did not run ads targeting their brand names.

Those with the ad got 91% of the clicks on that page. Those without the ad got 60%.

In other words, the group with the ads generated ~50% more clicks than those without ads.

Why does the presence of an ad make such a big difference?

To understand this point, you need to understand that there are three basic types of search results that a search engine like Google will share. They are:

• Organic Search
• Paid Search
• Local Search

The screen capture below identifies each type of result:

If you look at the above screen capture, you can see that the top result in the main vertical search section is not organic, but paid search. Likewise the most dominant visual element on the page is not organic, it's local search.

From this we should conclude that winning on organic search is actually only a small part of your overall search engine marketing strategy. Indeed, we could look at this another way by breaking down the SERP into results that go to resources the community owns, results that go to a competitor, and results that go to an ILS. Ideally you want the results to look like the Tamarin Ridge SERP:

However, if you don't have ads set up (or a properly set up local business listing) the results will be more like this:

So as you can see, the SERP above is grisly viewing if you're that community. ILS listings, competitor ads everywhere, and your own website barely taking up any space at all. It's bad news all around.

A successful online apartment marketing campaign needs to set your community up to dominate all three of the result types so that you can own as much of the SERP real estate as possible.

Why would ads make such a big difference in clickthrough rate?

Simple: Many search engine users can't tell certain ad types from organic results. According to Wordstream, when there are no ads down the right around half of all people don't know that the two paid search results (above the organic results) are ads.

In other words, many search engine users don't know what's an ad and what's an organic search result. As a result, they click the top result--and if that's an ad for your competitor, then they end up on your competitor's site--even when they search for you by name. You may as well let that competitor stand in your lobby handing out fliers.

On the other hand, if you have an ad at the top of the SERP you are well-positioned to generate traffic to your site either from the ad itself or from the organic listing. The big idea is that you've reduced the possibility of someone finding your competitor by reducing the space your competitor occupies on the SERP.

Conclusion

We've been saying for years that AdWords is the best and most neglected marketing opportunity for multifamily. This new study simply strengthens our case. If you want to improve your online apartment marketing, generate more leads, and make life easier on your leasing staff then there is no reason not to use AdWords and other paid search platforms.