Yesterday I cited the fact that paid search beat out organic (ie regular) search listings in the conversion rate category. I tracked down the actual figures so you can see for yourself.<\/p>\n
Plus maybe it’ll get certain people to stop calling me a liar (I’m talking to you, Mom). Anyway, here is the conversion rates based on a Web Side Story study.<\/p>\n
The percentages are a median of the results for each:<\/p>\n
Paid Search \/ PPC<\/strong>: 3.40% Conversion<\/p>\n Organic Search<\/strong>: 3.13% Conversion<\/p>\n The study was done from January to August of this year, during which they tracked 57 million SE visits. Their ridiculous name aside, Web Side Story has a sterling reputation so these results can be considered reliable.<\/p>\n Both of these search avenues beat what they term as ‘overall site conversion’, which, I believe, includes visitors who typed in the URL or were referred through some non-Search Engine link.<\/p>\n One notation they did make to the study is that the study participants had professional SEO\/SEMs working for them and\/or they were experienced in this area themselves, so their results may be higher than most.<\/p>\n But they still stand by the findings as the ‘overall site conversion’ benefitted from this factor as well, so the comparison remains a valid one.<\/p>\n Here’s the kicker. An earlier study by Web Side Story, done in the last quarter of 2005, measured the conversion rates of SE acquisitions and non-SE acquisitions.<\/p>\n This is different from the above study because ‘overall site conversion’ would factor in ALL conversions, both SE and non-SE. Here are the percentages that came out of the 2005 experiment:<\/p>\n SE Acquisitions Conversion<\/strong>: 2.30%<\/p>\n Non-SE Acquisitions Conversion<\/strong>: .96%<\/p>\n Now that’s a gap you’d want to consult a dental surgeon about. Non-SE avenues would include banner ads, shopping search engines & affiliate links.<\/p>\n The SE conversion rate lags the 2006 results, for some reason. Possibly because people tend to look at more sites while buying at Christmas time.<\/p>\n Most do shop around more because of their desire to find that perfect Christmas gift. As opposed to my fail-safe system of buying what’s on the front shelf at 7-Eleven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday I cited the fact that paid search beat out organic (ie regular) search listings in the conversion rate category. I tracked down the actual figures so you can see for yourself. Plus maybe it’ll get certain people to stop calling me a liar (I’m talking to you, Mom). Anyway, here is the conversion rates […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"content_audit":[110,112],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","content_audit-audited","content_audit-refresh"],"modified_by":"Jonathan Cook","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":622,"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"content_audit","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pananadesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content_audit?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}