The Ad visitor versus the organic visitor

[Mark_A]

If I had better tracking I would know the answer to this - Grr - tracking is an ongoing project atm.

1) Our Ads visitors have a high bounce rate and do not stay for long nor look at many pages.

2) Our organic visitors look at more pages and stay for longer on the website, fewer of them bounce.

Our offering is almost a service, we will make an item the customer wants and supply it to them, it is a technical product.

We can get more visitor [1] we just have to pay more or relax our criteria a bit, more of visitor type [2] would be trickier to arrange but an SEO program could be done.

Bearing in mind our offering would you target more Organic or Ads based visitors?

[Mark_A]

I know there is some odd psychology going on with some searchers.

There are searchers who will avoid clicking on an Ad link thinking that an organic link is more genuine. Despite that they likely will be as many machinations behind getting that organic link there, as there are getting the paid ad there.

Then there are searchers who don't care Ad or Organic they just want to get to the destination as soon as possible.

[Rndm]

A couple of thoughts. I wouldn't focus on page views or time, but rather conversions (ideally sales). Paid searchers are in general more likely and ready to convert especially if your targeted keywords are very transactional. In your scenario it sounds like your product/service may not be exactly what your visitors are expecting (I could be wrong here) so you need to keep that in mind. It is going to be more challenging if this is true and your landing page needs to do a great job of selling them if it's not exactly what they are seeking.

As for Organic or Paid I would look at it from a cost/time scenario. If you need sales today paid is probably the way to go. If you have time and think you can rank well for your product/service it could be a better option. I would definitely use a little paid to help me understand what are the best keywords for me to organically target at the very least.

[FranticFish]

I've been asking myself similar questions, from the POV of 'Do I need to adapt the way I do ads?'

The k/w I still get to see for Organic via search console are mostly long tail. Because the visit doesn't cost anything in the traditional sense you're happy to get what you get.

With ads I've been wondering if I should be more relaxed about things. Historically I've always focused on 100% buy/hire terms, but lately that approach isn't working all the time like it used to. When I look at conversions and adjust for number of visitors vs number of actions Organic usually out-performs Paid, and it did NOT used to be like that.

It seems massively counter-intuitive to take a more scattergun approach with an advertising medium that always allowed you to be laser-targeted, but targeting in the ways I'm used to gets harder and harder all the time, so I've been wondering if I should go with the flow and see what happens.

[Mark_A]

Hi Rndm " I wouldn't focus on page views or time, but rather conversions (ideally sales)" unfortunately I cannot track sales by source at the moment, I would like to but it is a work in progress. Indeed if I could do this I wouldn't have posted the question as I would know the answer.

Incoming enquiries arrive in a variety of ways, and while most of them have been on our website I don't in most cases know what kind of search they originated from. And they may have visited a few times since they first found us.

[Mark_A]

Hi FranticFish, yes we get more long tail from organic, I guess what I am asking is do genuine potential customers tend to spend more time, visit more pages and bounce less, which would suggest an SEO campaign would be worth pursuing, compared with visitors who bounce more, visit less pages and spend less time on site, which seems to be what Ads are delivering?

[Rndm]

Mark - That makes sense. If this is the case then tracking is where I would be investing time/money before anything else. I work with a lot of clients in a lot of spaces so time on site = sales is a moving target. In general though PPC visitors convert more quickly because they are further along in the sales process and don't need to spend as much time researching as they have already completed that part of the process. People that click on ads tend to be much more ready to pull the trigger in my experience.

[Manish Bhickta09]

Just a random Q Guys.

Do you think creating a separate Landing Page for paid ads improves CTR/Bounce Rate and thus lowers CPA's...

Or it is ok to have a single page for Paid + Organic..

Asking for a friend :)

[FranticFish]

@ Mark A

do genuine potential customers tend to spend more time, visit more pages and bounce less

I'm not sure that there is universal answer for that. The funnel is different in different niches. I just look at conversion actions, or actions on the path to conversion (starting a form, doing a search). I agree that it would be an interesting thing to fold in other metrics to try to gain a deeper understanding. Of course, without the keyword for organic the comparisons you can run are always limited because that is such a massive part of understanding your visitor.

@ Manish

I personally do not have separate pages for ads. I nearly always show the same page to ad and organic traffic, especially since Quality Score became a thing (and more recently Landing Page experience). With separate landing pages for ads you are entering duplicate content territory, so you need these landing pages to not be a part of the 'public' site that other users see. This means that if your user clicks away from the page they cannot get back (because it's a private 'orphan' page) without you setting a cookie and then using that cookie to adjust either your navigation system or adjust the way the page is served to that person.

I nearly always run ads to (hopefully) get the same sort of visitor who wants to do the same sort of thing as the visitors I want from organic, so I want them to have the same experience. The exception would be where I'm running ads on a different set of keywords - perhaps for a competition, or a special offer - something where the page is not permanent.

[Kendo]

I have always suspected that click throughs on Ads can be made by bots. Not venturing to at least one other page must surely be a warning sign.

[Mark_A]

Hi Kendo, would the bots be Google Bots ensuring we spent more money with Google, or would they be competitor bots trying to spend our money so we have less to compete with them with? :)

There would be a massive scandal either way .. massive ..

[engine]

Putting aside the issue of traffic validity, as that's a completely different conversation, I would consider using a heat-map to review user interaction on the landing page for the ad. Assuming the organic is to a different page, run the heat map on there, too.
For example: [webmasterworld.com...]

Knowledge is power.

[Kendo]

or would they be competitor bots

Not all bots but certainly some competitors checking rankings on their keywords. Most searches leading to my site use bad or misplaced english. So being a niche industry, when I see keywords that i would use that I have targeted, I do suspect that hits on those strings may be competitors. I see the same on a client's site and his industry is most competitive. So when his SEO guy keeps jumping up and down while pointing on searches made, I can only laugh and think "do any of these SEO people ever know what they are doing?"

[RhinoFish]

TLDR = Invest in ads.

This discussion can get very, very deep. :-)

First thing I'd say for you to review, to see how PPC and Organic differ for New vs Returning visitors.
If you like most sites I review, when you compare PPC to Organic as if they are doing the same thing for your funnel, you'll make some very big data driven mistakes.

Your PPC and Organic visitors are not arriving on the same keywords at the same rate per keyword.

For example, in Analytics...
1) Go to Audience / Behavior / New vs Returning
2) Add a Secondary Dimension of Source / Medium
3) Sort by the Secondary Dimension of Source / Medium (this will group your google / cpc new and returning next to each other, it'll also group your google / organic new and returning next to each other)
4) For google / cpc, calculate the ratio New / Returning Sessions.
5) For google / organic, calculate the ratio New / Returning Sessions.

I just did this for a site I own...
google / cpc New / Returning Sessions = 3.66 [79% New, 21% Returning]
google / organic New / Returning Sessions = 1.81 [64% New, 36% Returning]

In other words, my PPC New / Returning ratio is >2x my Organic New / Returning.
Conversely, my returning visitors are choosing to return via Organic at twice the rate that my PPC visitors are choosing Organic.
This alone will cause a huge shift in Bounce Rates and more.

Though my PPC Bounce Rate is 3x higher than Organic, the Conversion Rate of PPC is 36% Higher than Organic.
With my PPC, I am acquiring buying traffic and new shoppers (who will return via free Organic clicks (and cheap branded PPC clicks)).
I would definitely invest in more ads, if your stats look like mine.

Point being, these two channels do not serve the same function, so you can't compare them as if they do serve the same function.
:-)

[Mark_A]

Hi engine, Kendo & RhinoFish, thank you for your posts. My lack of a response does not indicate I was ignoring your posts, merely that I am thinking, which is sometimes a slow process for me :)