Which is worth more, a visitor from natural search or pay-per-click

I guess this will directly relate to the profit margin in the product and how much each click costs.

Five times as many people click on the natural left to the costing right... so this costs you a fortune either way!

Perhaps dogpile gives some indication... you can see if content is flying high naturally or by paid per click... then you could phone the companies and see if it's working for them. 

That depends on two factors, how you define "value" and how you define a visitor's source.

(Differences in visitor volume between the two is a different question entirely!)

For example, I've worked on sites that had great pay-per-click campaigns and relatively poor SEO. In such cases, we often noticed that visitors first found the site via PPC, but then later returned to the site via natural search to complete their purchase.

In such cases, Google Analytics naturally attributes the sale to natural search, but it's fair to say that it would never have happened without being initiated the PPC campaign. [GA can also be manually reconfigured to attribute sales to the first rather than last point of contact.]

Also, there is an incremental cost to PPC unlike SEO, meaning that value is presumably defined as the difference between the average PPC cost per sale and the transaction value? If not then natural search wins every time as it effectively has zero acquisition costs to detract from the sales revenue?

Does that help?

Anthony Sharot

Search Marketing Consutlant

On 13:36:14 19 November 2007 stephenkreppel wrote:

 

Hmmmmmmmm. Only 5 times as many clicks? What's the source for this, Jonathan?

I would not be surprised to find that 10 times as many clickers on the right hand side are prepared to buy - it's a more deliberate action, is it not?

However, I'm sure that the balance between right side and left side buyers will change according to the desirability of the offer, whether it's something that the consumer was looking for or whether they stumbled upon it, and so on.

Presumably, someone is collecting this kind of data somewhere?

Stephen K

On 22:21:00 18 November 2007 JonathanDavey wrote:

 

I guess this will directly relate to the profit margin in the product and how much each click costs.

Five times as many people click on the natural left to the costing right... so this costs you a fortune either way!

Perhaps dogpile gives some indication... you can see if content is flying high naturally or by paid per click... then you could phone the companies and see if it's working for them. 

 

I feel both are same. As others have mentioned, if they come thru natural search it doesn't cost you anything.

Michael
MoDazzle - Mobile networking for Salesforce Linked and Facebook

Hi John,

I'm afraid segmenting your customers/prospects by whether they clicked on PPC or Organic links is too simplistic an approach. Defining a customer's value is also fraught with difficulty.

We undertake a lot of research in this area for clients across a variety of sectors and see similar behaviours across the board. Typically a prospect will have a number of "touchpoints" online with your brand, these will include (but are not limited to) organic, PPC, banner, social media, email etc. Interaction with each of these touchpoints is an important part of the customer journey - acting as "assists".  What we derive from this is that each of those touchpoints has a value (or adds to the prospect deciding to purchase from you). We find on average 85% of sales have some form of assist.

That journey may include several visits to your site before the decision is made to transact. In fact, upto 60% of online sales will be completed via a different medium to the one in which they were started.

The traditional approach of assigning a "win" to first or last click is woefully inadequate to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing. What we should all be trying to do is track the prospect's journey across all these media and their journey through our sites.

Assigning a value to a customer according to the method in which they arrived on your site is altogether more complicated. How do we define value? Is it a single transcation? Or is it the lifetime value of that customer? In relation specifically to search, do we simply segment based on Organic or Paid? The reality is that there is a great deal of segmentation that occurs under those two broad headings. Certain paid terms will yield greater return than others, this will also be true of organic terms (showing a greater return than some paid). More importantly, certain segments of prospects will display different behaviours against the same terms. These behaviours will differ again according to where those prospects are in their buying cycle. 

As an example:-  PPC term Y will convert 5% of customer type A with a typical value of £X, but term Y will only convert 1% of customer type B with a typical value of £X/2 - Organic term W will convert 5% of customer type B with a typical value of £2X.    This is, of course, ignoring the influence of all other touchpoints and the prospect's position in the buying cycle.

I apologise if I have not shed any light on your original question, but I hope you'll appreciate the level of complexity that goes into truly measuring the worth of a customer and the media with which they interact does not allow for a simple answer.

If you'd like to discuss this more, or how you can begin to measure all of these factors, I'd be delighted to chat.

Best wishes,

Steve Webster - Red Eye International ()

On 17:54:53 16 November 2007 johncourtney wrote:

 

Anyone got any stats on this?  Appreciate being pointed in the right direction....

Thanks :)

John