Natural Listing Traffic vs PPC

[jimmyEzac]

I have been told from SEO companies that 85% of search engine users ignore paid ads. Is this a realistic number or are they padding the number to make their service seem more valuable. I know that from going from no marketing to PPC on google and overture that our sales have increased by 600% per month. So if I'm only hiting 15% of the SE users now, once I get optimized for my keywords and appear in the top 10 will I see another huge increase like before?

Thanks.

[marthrock]

What seems to be applicable is, that if one is researching a product then chances are they would search natural listings and if one is trying to buy a product then ppc would make better sense. But what doesn't make any sense is to ignore for the sake of the other. You have to have both so that you grab the users that are researching before they buy and or are price shopping...Does that help?

[TimH]

You will not see a significant increase from Organic search vs. PPC. With PPC your site can have a top listing for many keywords (from a few hundred to a few thousand) that apply to your site. With organic search you can get a top ten listing after a few months for 1 or 2 of those keywords by optimizing your tags and site content. If any SEO firm tells you differently, then I would ask them if they plan to use doorway pages which will get you banned from Google and other search engines for SPAM.

[cindym]

Your question is a good one. Interestingly Marketing Sherpa shed some light on it in their new Marketing Metrics Guide.

The results of iProspect and Enquiro's studies show that natural search clicks beat out paid search ads: overall across the top 5 engines (40% more), but especially in Google and Yahoo users, that women are more likely to click on paid ads but men on organic, that college graduates prefer organic, and those with more experience online (early adopters) likewise prefer organic. Fascinating stuff.

[DrTandem1]

Extrapolating from what Cindy reported, it is doubtful that many of your customers are women and therefore more will likely click on the organic listing.

I would be interested to know what keyword you targeted to increase your sales 600%. Under knives, I see no PPC. Using legendary blades, you're already number one in Google. It is possible that you are confusing the increase being caused by PPC rather than organic listings that are just coming into view.

Have you marked the URL from the PPC campaign so that you track your customers?

[jimmyEzac]

One of our best keywords on PPC is Gerber Knives. Knives is too broad and I cant keep a high enough CTR to keep that keyword with Google. Currently we are around page 3-4 on Google for that in natural listings. Dont confuse our website with the manufactures, they have gerberblades.com we are gerbertools.com. I will be switching our PPC links so I can track from the paid clicks and natural clicks. We will be starting some SEO next week and hopefully we will see a significant increase in sales by the time christmas comes around.

Basicly before PPC we had no marketing, you couldnt find us on the search engines and only a few sales a day, so the 600% is due to just starting any marketing program, I just happened to choose PPC because it was fast and didnt cost much to get started.

Thanks for the advice so far.

[DriWashSolutions]

Originally Posted by jimmyEzac

I have been told from SEO companies that 85% of search engine users ignore paid ads.

Forget about the SEO's, I've been told by my friends and coworkers that they rarely click on the paid ads. So this is coming straight from the horse's mouth - I think that anyone's business would grow significantly with a high position.

And, on top of that, I know that at my day job, the paid ads are Websensed if you were to click on them, so it forces you to click on the organic results.

I know that the sites in the top 2 positions for some of my keywords are bringing in 3-5 times more revenue than my site does (which is currently #47), so I have to disagree with TimH who says the organic results will not help. If PPC and organic were the same, why are so many folks (including the SEO's) working so hard and asking so many questions in this forum?

[ctabuk]

It depends on what you put in your ad box, if you just put 'Best Knives on the planet' - then you will reduce your traffic flow, if you put "Stop Press - here is what our competitors do not want you to see' then you will attract some interest. It's all about marketing. Which PPC are you using? David

[globalhostinggroup]

PPC advertisement I good for short term results while you work of your natural listings is also good for testing markets. Yes you results will increase with first page listings and they will increase even more with #1 rankings but be very cautious when selecting your SEO firm many use spamming techniques to promote your site and once your site gets good ranking your ban shortly fallows.

[paulchri]

You bet you will see an increase in traffic the more times your site comes up in your keyword universe -PPC, organic, rich media, on and on. Simply the odds favor you the more times on page one you appear. It's interesting to see how people note the which group is likely to click here or there. You can't predict anything given the multitude of variables such as ad copy strength or lack thereof, the fact that that 80-90% of searches are different, how many results are returned per page, in the case of PPC, how many people you're bidding against, where you appear (position one or along the side) and are you appearing for every possible impression event, etc. Be as high on the page without the user scrolling for many, many keywords as possible, as many times as you can.

We've used the "combo" technique for many clients.
We have 1,500+ PPC keyword phrases for a client who makes just industrial labels, stickers, membranes.
They received activity in so many areas that it's shocked us. One was from a hard drive manufacturer and a $1M a year contract resulted. Good Luck to You!

Paul C.
Target Marketing Solutions
http://www.targetmarketingsol.com