When National Speed used to have an eCommerce store, I began to develop a particular theory about Sponsored/Pay Per Click ads versus natural, organic search results.
My theory was that when a user searches for a term whether it be via Google or Yahoo!/Bing, their is a barrier of purchase between a naturally placed, organic result and the paid placement ad. The reason being that the natural result is borrowing the credibility (trust) of the search engine brand.
Basically, a natural result is like the search engine saying “We believe this is the result that best matches your query.” Compare that with the paid placement, which borrows some of the search engine’s trust (as they allow it to be displayed) but there’s still an paid advertising hurdle to over come. In this case, the search engine is saying “This is webpage might be relevant to you, but we’re showing it to you moreso because someone bribed us to show it, but if it were truly relevant, it would have showed up in organic results.”
Now, the above hypothesis does not mean PPC ads are worthless, not at all. I do, however, believe it means that we should be more considerate of how PPC is being used in online strategies, and the percentage of the pie it takes.
I bring all of this up because an well respected search engine optimization guy recently put out a post on whether users trust organic or paid results more on search engines. His post, which is a great read, confirms my thoughts!