Google Sponsored Tags: A Test Case

Note from Adam: Today’s post is by Thomas Ballantyne, the savviest internet marketer in the pest control industry! Thomas tested Google’s Sponsored Tags in Houston, and agreed to share his experience with us. Check out more of his work at his blog, or on Twitter.

Google has added sponsored tags for local business listings in Austin, TX. They are now serving up sponsored tags in Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, and Atlanta.

Below is a month of sponsored tag results for Houston, TX.

When considering if the sponsored ad is worth the money, my gut reaction is yes… but the numbers may tell a little different story. At $25/month the sponsored tag gave me 19 clicks to my website. The actual CTR is hard to determine because I am not sure if I am receiving more impressions of the tag then I am impressions of my map listing. But if the tag is related to the impressions the CTR would be 2.13%. The cost per click is $1.31. That cost is lower than a “pest control” click but not lower then the average click of my pest control campaign. So the good news is I get impressions for pest control. The bad news is I am also getting totally unrelated impressions for things like animal shelter. And just so you are aware, I am also getting a lot of impressions for people who search our company name, Bulwark Exterminating. Since this is not a PPC campaign I cannot use negative keywords or exclude non related searches. This makes it hard to determine the real value of the clicks. Of course since I am not paying on a per click base then I shouldn’t really care. Click away!

Actions to Impressions (ATI)

What is more curious is if the yellow tag under a business listing improves the overall performance of the business listing. So going back and comparing historical data shows a difference of actions to impressions (ATI). Prior to the sponsored tag my ATI was 20.98% for my Houston location. After the sponsored tag the ATI was 22.96%. That is an improvement of 1.98% on my regular business listing. Looks pretty good at first glance. But when comparing all other non-sponsored listings, the average increase for the same period of time was +2.15%. Because the difference is lower one must ask “Is a sponsored tag just dividing up clicks you would have gotten anyways?”

As pest control is very seasonal and dependent on many, many factors, there are a number of reasons this could vary. So as for now we cannot determine the effect of the yellow sponsored tag on overall ATI. As of Monday, Austin went live so in the near future we will be able to compare both Austin and Houston.

Atlanta is also live, but apparently my address in Buford, GA, suburb of Atlanta, does not qualify me for the Atlanta test.

Note on Numbers Above:

Google does not clearly define what they count as impressions. If you are featuring a map of your business on your website then this may skew your numbers. So to suggest that the above numbers only included searches for those keywords would be an assumption. One should also note that LBL’s may or may not be accounted in your Google webmaster’s tools. Based on the fact that Bulwark only shows up in the organic listings for pest control on page 2 and the webmaster tools show impressions on for positions 2-10 on page 1, I am inclined to believe that your webmaster’s tools do include the results from the Local Business Listings.

But again, I am just a pest control guy.