Study: Paid search accounts for only 15% of clicks

by Jack Humphrey on Mar 8

Was there ever a better argument for organic search results?

“Excluding queries that produced no clicks (which represents over 35% of total queries), sponsored results accounted for approximately 15% of clicks while organic results accounted for 84.2% of clicks.” -econsultancy

If paid search, sponsored results and the like are only attracting that level of clicks, there’s no wonder the competition, and price for clicks, is so fierce.

Might be time to beef up on how to get organic search traffic if you’re relying solely on paid.

Tagged as: organic traffic, paid search

  • http://www.GaryMcElwain.com Gary McElwain

    Jack, Thanks for the statistic.

    With the 153 different PPC Couse offerings in my email, I would be led to think that’s the only way to get clicks. But thanks to the Friday Traffic Report I know better.

    Thanks for keeping me informed about all these shiny objects, out to distract me.

    Gary McElwain

    Gary McElwains last blog post..Weekly Dose of Sunday Comics

  • http://josephratliff.name Joseph Ratliff

    I agree with the stats from E-consultancy…but paid search would only get a smaller percentage anyhow…until Google decides to put sponsored results within the main listings…which probably won’t happen.

    Do you look to the right side, or in the big ugly box at the top of the listings first when you search for something?

    SEO will be important, no doubt.

  • http://www.asktak.com/blog Tak Hikichi

    I have so many Adwords campaigns I run for affiliate programs. I am content only because they’re on autopilot — but your post now makes me think what if I optimized for those sites? As I learn more about blogging, it should attract more organic search results.

    A friend said he’s always hit momentum when he reached 1000th post. Then anything after that, it ranked anything he posted. Is that true?

    • http://www.jackhumphrey.com/ Jack Humphrey

      Tak – I’d say any blog with 10k posts, unless they were regurgitated articles or scraped content, is going to darned well. The web as a whole rewards rich sources of original content very well. The people AND the engines. I post and rank all the time. And I don’t have nearly that many posts on this blog yet.

  • http://woome.com/veroniica12 veroniica12

    Interesting, but it’s not surprising.

    I find, being an avid web surfer and participant in web communication, that the paid for advertising just doesn’t seem safe. I always feel like they’re trying to trick me. Therefore, why would users I’m trying to attract feel any different?

    However, due to hindsight bias and other biases that could affect my experience and opinion in a unique way, independent of other web surfers, it’s always good to have scientific data to back up my hunches!

    Thanks for the post :)

  • http://www.thinkpadtoday.com Ian Orford@thinkpad

    I can really clarify this issue jack. Last October, one of our main affiliate programs suddenly disallowed all PPC traffic and ‘brand name’ bidding. It was devastating at the time. We had organic traffic to the site, but not as much as we wanted.

    We were spending roughly $5000 per month on Google PPC, and making about $5000 profit, not bad but the stress and the fine balance between a real ROI, and loosing it some months was awful.

    In addition we were spending a lot of money on keyword tools, PPC tracking software, and the next latest and greatest PPC course. (It’s one of the reasons I couldn’t understand why you promoted PPC Classroom Jack, it didn’t fit)

    As soon as we stopped using PPC, and paying real attention to SEO, two things happened. Stress went down, enjoyment went up, and so did profit.

    Clear profit the first month without PPC was $4000, the next month $4300. Last month, February, it was $9300!

    Thats from a site with a Page Rank 3 and an Alexa Rank of 523367, because the traffic that comes is ‘high commercial intent’ traffic, in other words, we have optimized for the buying keywords along with giving what we think is good high interest content and reviews

    We now have tons of great keyword info from Google Analytics, for free, great real time stats from HitTail, (A superb service), the site is worth tons more and our skill set now allows us to duplicate what we have done with other sites.

    If you have a heavy reliance on PPC, moving is very scary. But until you learn to get the organic traffic you deserve, and spend the time initially to implement it, you wont be realizing your sites true potential.

    Cheers,

    Ian

    Ian Orfords last blog post..Lenovo Canada ThinkPad Coupon and St Patrick’s 8 Day Sale

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