organic vs cpc traffic

which has the better conversion rate?

[wingslevel]

have been watching this for a while - our cpc traffic converts at only about 60% the rate of our organic traffic

normal?

what are your experiences?

pls just state your cpc conversion rate as a % of your organic...

[jweighell]

In my experience the conversion has always been better for CPC traffic. This would suggest to me that the keywords you are using in your CPC advertising are too broad. People are clicking your broad adverts only to find you do not have exactly what they want. Try using more specific keywords and also 2-3 word combinations - I think you'll get better results.

It would probably be worth you looking at your logs and looking at the keywords that people are searching for and then including these into your CPC program.

The reverse is also true - you may find you're picking up searches for unwanted keywords - so you can add negative keywords too.

Jonathan

[mansterfred]

Many variables one needs to consider here. An important one is brand. Is this your item exclusively and do you have previous marketing into your brand. We have been around some 25 years and make an exclusive product. Although other online stores sell our product the do not rank well in the search engines nor do they attempt to give but the most basic of information. So a number of people who are already customers of our brand come to us to buy because of past experience. Our CPC conversation is ½ to ¾ percent. Our Organic is 3-4%

[Essex_boy]

I tend to agree with the figures from Mansterfred, Ive never had much success with PPC and find organic converts far better

[StuWhite]

Our CPC conversion rate is usualy at least double that of our organic.

Looking just at Google, last year we received organic traffic from about 13,000 different keywords. Conversion rate was around 2%.

Using adwords, we bid on 185 keywords with a conversion rate of 5%.

We are constantly monitoring CPA on adwords and we quickly stop ads which aren't making us money.

[Ledfish]

Like Essex Boy and Mansterfred, we have never had good luck with PPC advertising. For us it might be because of the industry we are in.

The other thing for us was that the return on investment just could not justify it.

But with all that said, when we did do PPC, we had a much better conversion on Yahoo vs Adwords for like terms abd because of that, we continued with our Yahoo PPC long after we gave up on adwords.