Top of natural search - why bother with PPC?

One of the classic "well they would say that wouldn't they" is Google's argument that it is important to be top of both natural and paid search.

Here's the standard bit of Google research on the subject, which suggests that you can treble the amount of traffic to your site by being prominent in both natural and search.

But is that still true if there is no competitive activity on PPC? According to our recent research - which is covered today in iMedia Connection- many prominent UK brands simply don't bother to bid on their own brand terms.

Last year's spat between Google and eBay led to eBay pulling their ppc spend from Google. Hitwise looked at the data and found that there was little or no impact on overall traffic through to eBay over this period.

The story would be very different for non-navigational terms, but for navigational / brand terms it seems that big brands are happy to ignore Google's advice.

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