E-tailers are pushing brands out of search

One would expect that you'd find leading brands to be at the top of search results. However, with Google's Product Listing Ads and Knowledge Graph in place, the landscape has become crowded. Major retailers are buying up brand terms, pushing actual brands further and further down the search results. According to L2's Digital Index, retailers account for 54% of paid results for UK Personal Care brands. Only 4% of brands do not have paid search results.


Google is the main player in search advertising and because of it, they charge pretty steep rates. Brands typically have smaller marketing budgets compared to these major e-tailers. They can also be less familiar with digital marketing, thus making it even more difficult to navigate and optimize their ranking.

The good news is that popular brands tend to appear first in organic search results. Brand sites rank first for 79% of Personal Care brands of organic search results. E-tailers make up 87% of first page organic search.

Organic Search is #1

According to a recent study, customers acquired through organic search are worth more than customers acquired through all other means, on a lifetime value basis. 

The study, compared organic search to everything from CPC to Email to Facebook and Twitter.  I'm a bit surprised that Twitter ended up 23% below the average CLV. Honestly, I thought most Twitter advertisements were more about brand building than about CLV, so I'm not sure how accurate the study is. 

The lesson here, is that optimizing your website, which moves you up the search rankings for "free" is a better value marketing than many of the paid marketing routes.

From the article, the growth of email marketing is significant, as it has grown over 4x over the last 4 years.  However, it is still dwarfed by Organic Search, which is twice as prevalent.