Whitey - 6:28 am on Dec 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

This is just my 2 cents worth, and it's a record of preceeding bricks and mortar activity which follows the same principle.

Firstly, without doubt, organic is stronger.

When you cross populate marketing channels the focus for measuring success get's progressively more difficult.

So you can start with organic and you are able to measure X
Then you head to PPC and you see an increase, such as Tedster suggests, of Y
Then you add PR, repeat business, referal traffic, other advertising channels and before long you have no accountability on the detailed effectiveness of your spend because one acts on the other and it is complicated to decipher what the effect will be of removing or adding a channel.

Ultimately, if you do not convert this business to nice solid repeat and referral traffic, the whole business will become very costly, with PPC probably close to amongst the top of the list. Organic traffic is an inter dependant which ultimately will have a limited lifecycle according to Google's commercial objectives, fierce competition and your ability to adapt.

I guess most big and solid small business' get to a point where marketing becomes simply part of an overall budget, rather than a meticulous monitoring of component activity. They would likely consider organic marketing as a brand support technique, rather than the other way round.

[edited by: Whitey at 6:29 am (utc) on Dec. 31, 2006]