Posted on July 19, 2010 by As any marketer knows, search engines can bring your website traffic from two separate areas of the search engine results page (SERPs).
The red section is the paid-for listings (PPC). The green is for the organic listings (SEO). Barracuda Digital can help with both your PPC and SEO.
The question is: which side brings the most valuable traffic?
The short answer is: it depends. It varies from site to site, and the only way to really work it out is by analysing your conversion rate and ROI using your web analytics.
And the long answer? What about ‘on average’? Well according to an economic study published recently by Google, it’s the paid for – or sponsored listings – that bring the most valuable traffic. Google go as far to say that organic clicks are worth just 70% of their paid-for counterparts.
Why are paid-for listings worth more?
Google don’t say why they make that call, so here are a few ideas of our own.
1. People who click on the adverts have a specific intent. They know what they want, and are prepared to cost a business money in order to get it. They consider that a fair exchange, and are prepared to enter a transactional relationship.
2. There’s fewer paid-for listings that organic listings. For each search term there are probably just a few thousand competing advertisers, but 100s of thousands of websites competing for the organic listings. So a click on the paid for listing is takes a great share of the overall opportunity.
3. The only advertising that sticks around is the stuff that’s working. By and large, business won’t poor money into advertising that doesn’t work, and would sooner turn it off. By contrast, a website might continue to rank highly in the organic listings even though it no longer sells a product. Therefore the paid clicks are more likely to be accurate and result in good value for both users and website owner.
4.Adverts are human edited and controlled more closely. Not only are they written, and placed on a keyword by keyword basis, they also pass a ‘quality score’ judgement by the AdWords system. Therefore they are more likely to represent the best place for that user to arrive. By contrast, the organic listings are Google’s best guess at the user’s intention.
5. Adverts are deep linked to the most appropriate page on the website. By contrast, organic listings often send traffic to the home or category page, or make poor judgement due bad signals as to the best landing page.
Which side of the page brings you the most traffic? How does it vary in quality? Leave us a comment below.
