Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?

I am a little late to the party, but want to address one topic that I didn't see mentioned below.

One answer to your question is "volume", with a related cause of personal incentives.

You're getting those clicks for free and buying ads on branded terms is just cannibalizing your organic results. Now, instead of $500 per day, you want to scale your campaign to $5,000 per day.

How do you do that? Your return will be less efficient as you seek volume, but you need to spend the $5,000 as effectively as you can.

You (or the agency) look better / get paid more when they're able to spend with a better return. It's probably not your department, or your KPI, what the organic SEO is like. So if you cannibalize some conversions from organic in the SEM attempt to spend the budget and raise conversions, you're probably happy, because you're hitting KPIs that matter to you.

It would take a wise leader to recognize what is happening. Even then, they might decide that although the efficiency of the overall SEO/SEM spend is lowered, it provides more volume. If your company is focused on growth, they may prefer volume over efficiency.

It's rational, once you try to see the larger context in which these decisions are made w/in a company. (It also has it's drawbacks)

A big factor in how much you pay for every click is quality score. The likely biggest factor in quality score is your relative click through rate for the position (i.e. Google wants to show the ad that gets clicked more because it makes them more revenue, if you get clicked 10% of the time for a keyword in position 2 and your competitor gets clicked 8% of the time, Google wants to show your ad and even gives you a discount of sorts on the click via higher quality score.)

So, if you google your keywords to see how your ad appears, you have 2 choices. Click on your ad, which will cost you money or dont click and lower your click through rate which can lower your quality score, especially if you do it often.

The issue of polluting data is that now your agency or whoever is managing your SEM sees either a lower click through rate if your dont click or a lower conversion rate if you do click and will make optimization decisions without knowing how many searches were you.

Google has an ad preview tool in Adwords to let you check without impacting your data.

In the greater scheme of things, if its a high volume query, the harm is minimal, but if its a high value term with low search volume (i.e. a big ticket local service) it can really hurt you.

I somewhat agree with your point about the tone. I will apologize after writing this.

(Edit: Your post has me confused because you start off talking about tone and than you fail to take your own advice about reasonable discourse.)

Your assumptions however are way off...I would never criticize someone for something remotely excusable, but advertising on Google without taking 2 minutes or less to learn something as fundamental as match types is about as reckless as buying a rolex on the streets from a guy on a manhattan street corner and than feeling ripped off...Some things, like match types, fit into the category of reckless despite how easy you want to think running Adwords is.

My frustration is that so many people waste so much money on digital advertising because "they think they can do it themselves."

This specific guy was sharing advice warning people about adwords wasting his money. Adwords didnt waste him a penny, his unwillingness to do less than 2 minutes of preperation or asking a pro led to that...

Even with over a decade experience, I still learn new things about Adwords almost daily...The idea that people think that its simple and they can run it themselves is frustrating, but to not even know about match types, I cant think of any excuse that justifies it short of arrogance and/or laziness.

Adwords is an auction. When my competitors choose to waste money, My costs get driven up. It hurts everyone but Google...so take the 2 seconds to read up on how to do it or dont complain and tell the world it doesnt work.

Or ask me, Im happy to help with basic strategy for free, its in my best interest for my competitors to run advertising that is accountable to a bottom line and thay doesnt compete in irrelevant query auctions.

Only very limited 3 months of worth data. Everything costs nowadays when it comes to Google. And Facebook.

Got it, thanks.