ppc vs. organic ranks

anybody have stats on ppc vs. organic rankings...

is there any literature on how viewers use or distinguish or use one vs. the other?
looking for demo and psychographics profiles of those who will use ppc vs. organic.

if you could refer me to any sources or if you have read something.... great!

thanks.

alan

If i were you, I would go for both =) The organic ranks are free besides a little elbow grease in obtaining the rank.

PPC however can be costly in a competitive industry, but at the same time generate great ROI. To sum it all up, go for both. If you are not concerned with organic ranking enough to consider not using it over PPC then if you dont increase ranks quickly in organic, PPC still runs and generates.

When going for PPC, I would suggest more specialized terms.

Instead of just "widgets" which might have a lot of competition for, tried "Green Widgets", "Blue Widgets" which might have less competition, might cost less PPC and is closer to what the customer is lookin.

If you tried for the term "widgets", you might have customers looking for "Purple Widgets", "Red Widgets", both of which you do not have and so just wasted money.

I would do both. Organic definately. PPC you will have to try different ones to see what works for you.

My .02

Isn't the percentage of users who are conducting a search around 70% of those who choose the natural listings as opposed to the "sponsored" PPC listings???

I remember this being the case a while ago. Users would state that they can tell that it is an advertisement, and not might be accurate like the natural listings, so it had a higher click ratio on the natural.




7

I would imagine that it changes a lot depending on 1) the search terms/target audience and 2) the search engine

I'm guessing yahoo/msn etc have much higher CTRs than google does.

I've had luck with Overture, Findwhat and Goclick. The Google Ads did nothing for me... but I'm going to revisit it again (it's been a year or so since the last time).

word of warning when we tried overture we had to stop because a complete spam site that overture was somehow allowing to serve its ads were sending endless clickthroughs and costing us a fortune, probably the site owner aswell we tried to get overture to ban serving our ads to this site but they never complied

I've read a lot about how the industry your in can highly effect the comparison of conversion rates of organic v. paid results.

For instance, in retail, paid results might have a better conversion rate than organic, where in real estate, it might be just the opposite.

One thing is for sure though...you can't go wrong with organic, cause it's free!

I would have to agree. I had to choose solely between PPC and organic, I would definately go with organic. Optimize, optimize, optimize your web pages and you should do good.

PPC might get you there faster, but you will have to pay for it, and continue to pay for it to keep it there.