As a webmaster of a small business website, I get a lot of SEO’s calling me, touting their services.
One of the claims many make is that the traffic from organic searches converts better than that from PPC searches. I currently handle all of our search engine optimization as well as PPC management. Having never tested the theory, I cranked up Google Analytics and started rummaging through data.
The following test is the result. It is using only results from Google.
I first found three metal roofing related keywords on our website that had fairly high traffic from both organic and PPC campaigns. Next I broke down the data, comparing the conversion rates separately for organic and PPC. The following is the data, using data from the last 12 months.
Based on this data, at least for our website, PPC converts better. That’s not to say that organic traffic like “roofing experts” doesn’t convert well, it’s just that PPC converts better.
Below is the data in Google Analytics (I cut it all up in order to make it fit in a reasonable amount of space)
I only used the data for the “Completed Form” conversion measurement in the graphs, but I left the data for “Contact Page Clicks” for you to see as well. By both measurements PPC traffic converts approximately 50% better than organic data.
I entered this data into an Excel Spreadsheet, which you can download here.
Answers to a few of the questions you might want to ask:
- Question: Are the PPC landing pages the same as the organic landing pages?
- Answer: All of the organic landing pages are the home page.
- On keywords #1 and #3, which has the most data, about half of the PPC goes to the home page, while the other half goes to a second level page. The conversion levels remain about the same on either page.
- On keyword #2, all of the PPC goes to a second level page.
- Question: So why are you releasing this data? Do you hate SEO?
- Answer: First of all, I believe the benefits of SEO are massive. 45% of our traffic is organic. I released this data to shed some light on possible misinformation that has been spread around. I love SEO : )
- Question: Does this apply to all websites and keywords?
- Answer: I have no clue, not having access to multiple website data. I’m sure it varies from industry to industry. If anyone else has information on this please share it in the comments.
Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome and encouraged.
