Is ppc becoming more influential than organic search with consumers?
-
Simply put, are consumers clicking on ppc in lieu of organic search. In the past, people use to say that ppc accounted between 30-40% of traffic with organic accounting for majority of activity. My question is whether those numbers have changed, and if so, where are we now?
A friend in Boston in does SEO, remarked that many of her 'sophisticated' friends didn't know the difference between ppc and organic. Seems odd, but with the move to place ppc results from the right hand sidebar to the top left hand column, certainly gives it more presence and makes the separation between ppc vs. organic less distinct.
I certainly understand the value of doing both, but depending on the answer, it begs the question... is the expense of moving up a position or two in organic worth the effort and monies, if ppc is becoming the dominant raffic tdriver?
Anybody have any recent statistics on ppc vs. organic?
Thanks.
-
Thanks Joel. I have a laptop and at times, the distinction between google adwords and organic seems faint. Nevertheless... I think you're right. To the unsophisticated, not sure they make note of the differences, when they don't know there's a difference in results. I agree... there's good synergy when you can get ppc and organic working...as they say in real estate...location, location, location... when you see those results repeatedly on the same page... it has impact. Thanks.
-
Thanks Saijo. I somewhat agree. The distinction between organic and ppc, now that ppc has moved to the top left side from the olden days of just being on the right hand sidebar... blurs the differences. Thanks.
-
I have no data to draw the conclusion from but I get how more users might click on PPC especially the ones on top of the SERPs . Would be interesting to see if anyone has some stats on these.
-
Thanks for your response. We've invested many years in SEO successfully. One interesting change over the past year is that the traffic has dropped for some KW phrases without any change in rankings in Google. In some cases, these are terms sitting at #1 or #2. I think the demarcation between PPC and organic is becoming harder to distinguish and given the naivete of many consumers... many assume the listings are one and the same. If I'm right, it means that a higher percentage of searches are pulling from sponsored links than organic compared to the past. Is there any data or research to negative or support this assumption? Thanks. Alan
-
It may not be that it's becoming more influential, it may be that ppc is taking up more screen real estate and pushing organic listings further down the page.
See: http://www.seobook.com/paid-inclusion
Here’s a quick rundown on what we’ve been doing for Synergy
SEO
We recently performed a comprehensive site audit (<a>\GREEN\S-clients\Synergy\SEO Audit\Synergy SEO Recommendations.docx</a>) which identified the following issues / recommendations:
Fix duplicate content
Fix broken internal links
Optimise title tags
Create an xml sitemap
Update Google Analytics tracking code
Verify for Google Webmaster Tools
Once implemented our recommendations will lead to better search engine indexation, higher rankings and increase organic search traffic.
SEM
We’ve recently refined a number of advertising campaigns which have led to:
Increases in online account signups
Increases in online direct debit signups
Subsequently reducing the workload of the client’s internal resources.
We continue to work towards improving the number of conversions at a lower cost per conversion.
FYI, last month’s SEO and SEM reports can be found here: <a>\GREEN\Q-Admin\Production Management\Site Marketing\Clients\Synergy\Reporting</a>
-
Bing actually has an off white color for the ppc ads versus a white color for organic which makes them blend in together. This is great for the ads because it can cause confusion. So the margin is closer here.
Google still differentiates the two enough that most people notice the difference. People still favor organic results unless they are looking for a brand that is in the ppc section.
Note: It is great to be both on the ppc ad and organic results. You have greater branding potential and people will most often click the organic result vs the ad.
-
Its like comparing Apples to Mangoes really . If you are having client who seems to be confused .. you should educate them about what each of them offers.
With organic you need to invest time and effort and the results will take time .. With PPC you get value based on the Money you put it ( that is not to say there is no time / effort put in to it ) and can be used for quick wins.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Search Volume, Organic Rankings and Adwords
Hi, I hope you can help. And if this has been answered before, I apologise. Just spent two hours searching but couldnt find much at all. So I have this website, and it ranks in the top 10 for around 150 keywords. Its fairly niche market for targeting the UK market, but subject is for a local area, its got a good optimised site, no link issues, works well, good UI etc. Problem I have is this. It used to get a fair amount of organic traffic a few years ago to generate around 30 leads a day, and back then that was from just one keyword. Today, we may get one a lead a day from organic even though we rank for a lot more keywords and our exposure all round is good. However, we also pay for adwords to make up for the lost leads, the same keywords we are ranking for organically! So we bid on adwords and get our 30 leads with the same keywords and monthly search volume as we have organically, yet we dont get any leads for those keywords organically. So Adwords produces leads, organic doesn't, but they are the same keywords and rank next to each other. How does that work? So my question is, why do our organic keywords that rank just under the adwords that we bid for, with the same monthly searches, only give us 1 lead a day (when they used to give us 30) and adwords now give us 30 leads a day? Thanks James
Paid Search Marketing | | jaimo6930 -
Gap in Google PPC Ads & Organic search results - New test by Google?
Hi All, Just noticed an unusual gap in PPC ads and organic search results in google NZ. while searched the same term in Google AU, it wasn't the same. Did anyone here see something similar? Is this a new test by Google to get more clicks on PPC ads and pushing down organic results? Looking forward to hear from the community. Cheers, Rattan wcB6DL1.jpg
Paid Search Marketing | | FRL0 -
AdWords/Analytics Paid Search conversions not matching up - any idea why?
Hi all, Any ideas as to why AdWords and Analytics are showing different Paid Search conversion numbers for me when I check on a daily basis? Both accounts are linked, they share the same destination URLs to trigger a conversion, some days each reflects the same amount of conversions, then some days it's anything from 1-5 conversions different (Analytics is always the one to show more). Thanks M
Paid Search Marketing | | Martin_S0 -
Could longtail keywords really produce up to 80% more organic traffic long-term?
I was listening to a podcast on site visibility's website and they were discussing www.hittail.com which is a piece of software which analyzes lists your
Paid Search Marketing | | whitbycottages
visitor stream in real-time and provides actionable list of precisely which
keywords the website should be targeting to dramatically grow your organic
search traffic using long tail key words. The say they can come up with a list of long tail keywords which the
website could easily rank for hopefully straightaway in the top five positions
on Google and other search engines by creating a blog post are some relevant
content. Or you could use the information to form some anchor text links etc They say it's possible to produce up to 80% more traffic organically
once you are aware of which keywords are being overlooked by the website and
then produce the relevant content. The theory is that most people focus on the high traffic short tail
keywords and overlook the long tail keywords and I got to admit I actually fall
into that category unfortunately. Anybody uses particular website? And what is your experience of targeting the
longtail keywords have they produce good results ?0 -
SEOMOZ of PPC?
Hi The site I'd been following over the years last updated in May, so it's clearly not the authority it once was, I know there's a PPC post here about once a month but I was wondering where do the PPC brigade spend most of their time? My work is 50/50 atm but was once much more PPC focused, is there an SEOMOZ equiv. in the Paid Search world?
Paid Search Marketing | | xoffie0 -
Best keyword traffic analysis tool for long tail search terms?
Please bare with me, this might turn into a bit of a waffle, but I'll get to my question... I promise! I've just been looking at our CPC traffic for April and 2 search terms jumped out at me. I recognised them from previous keyword research because they are search terms that I expected to be high traffic (from past experience), but Google Adwords keyword tools showed them to have no potential traffic, and next to no potential traffic (literally 0 local searches and 12 local searches per month). Last month search term A had 46 visits, with 19:25 average time on site and 8.70% bounce rate and search term B had 10 visits with 14:47 average time on site and 0% bounce rate. For very boring reasons we are not currently able to measure conversions on these terms since (they are related to consumer finance and when a customer applies for finance it is all done on our finance providers website) but despite the low volume, these are pretty good figures for on site behaviour and so it got me thinking... Is there a more accurate tool to estimate traffic volume that we should be using rather than the Adwords tools? I appreciate that the estimates are probably made based on historic search behaviour and April's traffic could just be a one off, but these particular terms used to be insanely popular 4-5 years ago when I worked at a competing company.
Paid Search Marketing | | DWJames1 -
Does anyone have a good resource for learning PPC?
Hi guys I'm looking for a good resource to brush up on PPC. Any help would be great. Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | flemingsteele0