Proportion of traffic from adwords vs organic search

[ConradC]

Hi People,

I wanted to know if anyone knows what typical click through rates of paid vs organic search results are. We seem to be experiencing a very low click through rate with our organic search results versus our adwords and it seems to be getting worse.

For example our website www.natureshop.co.uk ranks 4th for the search phrase "icebreaker" in google.co.uk (and we are the first online retailer). We are the first adwords listing as well.

For the past 3 months we have had 867 clicks through our organic listing and yet with adwords we had 14,000 clicks. This seems pretty strange to me.

Both have conversion rates of around 5%.

Do you think these sorts of stats are becoming the norm for brand based searches? (icebreaker is a merino wool clothing brand).

Adwords also says that there were around 125,000 impressions of this phrase in the search network for this period. Which means with a ranking of 4th our click through rate is less than 1%?

If anyone else can share their experience or provide some commentary on this it would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Conrad Cranfield

[MRCSearch]

Not logged in, no location set, I've got you coming in 6th naturally here, just below a block of videos, and well below the fold. Might be that many searches, but you're below what I would consider just-as-relevant (and then Wikipedia, sigh) content. 1% CTR is not bad for slice #6.

[JGar-28032]

Right off the bat I point you here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mission-imposserpble-establishing-clickthrough-rates

These numbers are actually pretty close to what I usually see. There are exceptions and it can be wildly different depending on the results, type of business, etc.

1% might seem low for 4th position, but I've actually seen that quite a bit. The traffic estimates by Google are usually BS. Are you looking at broad match or exact match?

Also, I know "icebreaker" is your brand, but it is a pretty vague search term. As you said, you're the first retailer. I see other results; something about a ship, etc.

I also see Amazon up there, which is a well-known brand. Sometimes it's not the fact that you're being out-ranked, but by whom you are being out-ranked. What I mean is, if you were being out-ranked by lesser-known brands, then you would probably see better CTR. But Amazon is super well-known.

All those things combined, not bad I would think.

To answer your question though, it really all depends on the brand. I work with a group that is very well-known right now. And their brand terms bring more traffic than any other type of terms.