Legal Marketing & PR

Paid Search Results Bring Bigger Spenders than Organic Search Results

By Larry Bodine, Esq.

Now here's something I didn't expect: according to a new study by Engine Ready, an Internet marketing company, suggests that visitors who get to retail sites through sponsored links are more likely to buy than those who click on organic results. They also spend more; the average order of a paid linker was $11 higher, at $117.06.

Up to now, the prevailing view is that being found in an organic search yielded better results for web site owners than pay per click advertising.  The new research suggests that marketers shoudl indeed buy ads that show up alongside results on search engines like Google, as opposed to spending money on search engine optimization to produce higher organize search results.

The study states, "Upon completion of data compilation, we found that the aggregated sales dollar volume resulted in a distribution among the four traffic source categories as follows: Jamie Smith, the chief of Engine Ready, told the New York Times that human shoppers might be turned off by the tricks that make a site show up higher in Google rankings. In particular, Google's Web trawling software is lured by pages with lots of material. 'When we're optimizing for search engines, content is king,' Smith said. 'But less is more when engaging a visitor.'

You can download the study, "SEO vs. PPC – The Final Round" and judge for yourself.

• Organic listings – 11%
• Paid listings – 27%
• Direct Access/Bookmarks – 39%
• Other referrers – 23%

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on August 19, 2009 (boomark / email).