Paid (PPC) Search versus SEO
August 9, 2007 ::: Increasingly I read and
hear about people in the Internet marketing business arguing over whether paid
search (pay per click ads) is more valuable than organic SEO, and vice versa.
While there are some fascinating and relevant arguments on either side, research
shows that
marketers are quite satisfied with both.
A report from the SEMPO
State of the Market Survey from about 18 months ago shows that 83% of
respondents were using PPC compared to only 11% using SEO. Other reports show
that the value of SEO is rising as user sophistication increases (according to
Chris Boggs in the Spring 2007 edition of
Search
Marketing Standard).
Marketing Sherpa's
2005 report showed SEO conversion rates overtook PPC rates at 4.2% versus 3.6%.
That's quite the opposite of what had been found the year before.
The Direct Marketing
Association reported in 2005 on a list of "online marketing strategies that
produce the best ROI that PPC and SEO were rated equally according to US
retailers, behind only "having a website" and "using email marketing". A more
recent study by Marketing Sherpa, though, showed SEO ahead of email marketing,
with PPC a close third.
One thing seems to be true: if a given web site shows up in both the organic
search engine listings and the PPC ads, that seems to super-validate it as a
good choice, which increases the likelihood of a searcher clicking on one of
those listings.
Rob Laporte on 29 Oct 08The Disconnect in PPC vs. SEO Spending Posted by randfish on Tue (10/21/08) at 12:21 AM Paid Search Ads There's a big disconnect in the way marketing dollars are allocated to search engine focused campaigns. Let me highlight: Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013. - Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008 OK. So companies in the US spent $10 billion last year on paid search ads, and even more this year. How about SEO? SEO: $1.3 billion (11%) - Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008 According to SEMPO's data, it's 11% for SEO and 87% for PPC (with another 1.4% for SEM technologies and s turn to Enquiro: Organic Ranking Visibility (shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location) Rank 1 - 100% Rank 2 - 100% Rank 3 - 100% Rank 4 - 85% Rank 5 - 60% Rank 6 - 50% Rank 7 - 50% Rank 8 - 30% Rank 9 - 30% Rank 10 - 20% Side sponsored ad visibility (shown in percentage of participants looking at an ad in this location) 1 - 50% 2 - 40% 3 - 30% 4 - 20% 5 - 10% 6 - 10% 7 - 10% 8 - 10% Fascinating. So visibility is considerably higher for the organic results. What about clicks? Thanks to Comscore, we can see that clicks on paid search results has gone down over time, and is now ~22%. Conclusions: SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets. Questions: * Why does paid search earn so many more marketing dollar
