This is could be yet again another blow on the effectiveness of SEO and PPC as a study conducted by Engine Ready, an Internet Marketing Ready that neither of the two brings more revenues on Internet marketing site.
As cited by the New York Times, Engine Ready analyzed 18.7 million visits in a span of two years on web sites run by 27 of the company’s 500 clients. The study compared how customers react to paid listings and organic search results. Paid listings have 17% more successful transactions on the site than those who arrive on the site through organic search results. Also, these site visitors spent about 18% more on each order.But the most effective site visit was brought by neither of two. Instead, the study found that those who visit Internet marketing site through direct traffic coming from users typing the URL of the site on their browser. Users who came from bookmarks also produce better revenue for the site.
Likewise, those visitors will most often than not return to site in the future and even spend the longest time, the most money, and the most likely to become buyers. These users’ visits are valued at $5.69 apiece.
Whether you believe that validity of the study and the company who did the study, or not I guess it is but natural that those who enter the URL of the site on their browser to visit the site have the highest revenue. It simply means that the users knows about the site and trust the site enough to not even bother searching for it online. But still, it is hard to ascertain whether SEO or PPC is really not giving adequate returns to site owners.
Comments
11 responses so far ↓
David on Mar 10, 2008 at 11:22 am
We’ve always found natural search engine optimization to outperform paid search marketing by as much as 400% in some cases.
Regardless, both SEO and SEM are important to any successful online marketing strategy.
martinibuster on Mar 10, 2008 at 12:45 pm
>>>The study compared how customers react to paid listings and organic search results.
Paid listings you are controlling, or exerting a strong influence, on the circumstances of the visit, i.e. Buy Blue Widgets. With organic, particularly poor organic optimization, your visitors are coming for a variety of reasons, not all of them for purchase or even browsing.
WebSite Design Orange County on Mar 10, 2008 at 2:37 pm
The ROI on long term PPC campaigns has, for us, always under performed the organic approach. Of course you do need to factor in how competitive the key phrases are, and how long it will take to garner a good SERP.
Brick Marketing on Mar 10, 2008 at 4:50 pm
It seems there is always data supporting the effectiveness of SEO/PPC and then the next week data that contradicts that claim. One could imagine that each niche and industry should have their own data as the users for each may have completely different online buying habits.
carbon on Mar 10, 2008 at 9:23 pm
so, getting your site on top of google is the only way getting all the potential customers?
Dennis on Mar 11, 2008 at 3:50 am
well well well .. the information is real good. just keep it up
Seo Expert on Mar 11, 2008 at 9:14 am
The article says that direct traffic or bookmarked entries convert better, the real question is how did they find the site the first time?
If you have gained enough interest for a potential customer to bookmark your site, of course your chances of converting will be higher. Organic traffic has produced high numbers of repeat visitors for us so it’s hard to knock successful SEO.
Steve on Mar 11, 2008 at 11:12 am
I have noticed the more Internet educated the potential purchaser is related to the product offered for sale, the less they will click on pay per click ads. Educated surfers go for the top organic and the “myspace” purchasers click on the first site that shows.
Steve on Mar 11, 2008 at 11:15 am
Follow-up- there seem to be 100 times more “myspace” surfers than there is surfers that know the difference between ppc and organic.
China SEO Company on Mar 11, 2008 at 12:12 pm
1-A good question by SEO Expert, how did the type-in clients found the sites at the first place?
2-An important factor has not been considered, what is the percentage of visitors that come from SEO/PPC as compared to direct visits? Direct visitors can convert into sales at a 100% rate, but if they make only 5% of the site visits it doesn’t really matter as most sales (in terms of volume) will still come from other sources.
3-For more competitive keywords (web hosting, real estate, money and finance related for instance), SEO may actually outperform PPC since the cost per click is quite high while there are many companies available for the client to choose from.
edl seo on Apr 9, 2008 at 2:52 pm
What’s new ? if direct visitors who already bookmarked the site won’t buy who will ?
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