PPC has higher bounce rate than Organic?

20 percent higher to be exact, for the same keywords

[ChopperPhil]

We have been running a PPC campaign for a month now. Google Analytics is showing a 20 percent higher bounce rate for PPC than for the exact same phrases used in Organic searchs (Yahoo! and Bing).

This is for multiple phrases and is consistent. Phrases are derivitives of "[fuzzy purple widgets]".

Is anyone else experiencing something similar? Any thoughts?

[edited by: buckworks at 2:29 pm (utc) on June 19, 2009]
[edit reason] removed specifics; see TOS [/edit]

[RhinoFish]

it all depends on how hard you push with your ppc. if you aim like a sniper, your bounce rate will be lower and your conversion & roi will be higher. i've seen legit cases of ppc bounce rate being on either side of the organic bounce.

in situations where you're an roi centric ppc operator though, i expect your ppc bounce to be less than your organic bounce - because you can control keywords, landing pages, ad pitch and expectation setting better in ppc than you can in organic.

so you don't necessarily have a problem with your situation - if you're pushing hard and aiming wide, you may get this result. it's an expensive (low roi) road to take, but sometimes the volume or biz goals (growth, branding, loss leaders, etc) makes it the proper choice.

[ChopperPhil]

RhinoFish, thanks for your thoughts. The phrases are highly targeted and linked to the specific page. And this is a successful course for us with good conversion rates from organic Yahoo! and Bing searches. Zero conversions from Google PPC.

Besides my own company I work for a company that has a very large PPC campaign and excellent Organic positioning as well, with a team of dedicated SEO and marketing people. One thing they've identified that I haven't yet tried is they get lower bounce rates and better conversions by NOT sending the user to the page that matches the key phrase (in this case a specific vacation home rental) but instead sending them to a higher level; such as vacation homes in hawaii when they were searching on vacation homes in maui. Seems counter-intuitive to me... but...

[RhinoFish]

yahoo mixes search and content traffic - if they're converting well for you and if G has zero conversions, you need to check into your conversion tracking setup. if we're just talking about g search, and comparing it's bounce rate to Y's traffic, something's likely wrong with the tracking you're seeing because the quality of traffic, in a well controlled campaign at G, is much higher than the average at Y. That's been my experience anyway.