Organic Search Conversion Rates Beat PPC Conversion Rates
By Anna Johnson on March 21st, 2010Research by MarketingSherpa indicates that organic search traffic delivers higher conversion rates than PPC traffic, across all kinds of ‘conversion’ (i.e. the action desired by the marketer, whatever that action might be).
MarketingSherpa’s Jen Doyle attributes this to the fact that “organic searchers are often already familiar with the brand, have searched for specific products and are more likely to be closer to purchase rather than still considering many brands.”
In other findings – and as you might expect – the closer to the beginning of the marketing funnel is the desired action, the higher the conversion rate will be. As such, opt-in conversion rates are typically higher than sales conversion rates.
Here are the average conversion rates across all kinds of conversions found by MarketingSherpa in surveying 679 companies engaged in search marketing activities:
1. Online sale of product/service
- Overall conversion rate: 6.1 percent
- PPC conversion rate: 5.0 percent
- Organic conversion rate: 7.2 percent
- Shopping engine conversion rate: 6.6 percent
2. Lead generated (registration data or email obtained)
- Overall conversion rate: 8.4 percent
- PPC conversion rate: 5.8 percent
- Organic conversion rate: 7.0 percent
- Shopping engine conversion rate: not applicable
Source: Jen Doyle, “New Chart: How Do Your Search Conversion Rates Compare?” March 16, 2010
May 5th, 2010 at 6:44 am
Good article. I always tell my clients that organic SEO offers the best ROI, and that PPC should generally only be used for immediate, initial traffic until the organic kicks in. This is especially true when considering the high, ongoing price of SEM versus SEO.
The specific numbers you provided are interesting, though, and gives many people in the dark something to go by. Thanks.
September 24th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Hmmm…very interesting (even if I am a bit behind in finding this article in Sept-2010). Those numbers are a lot higher than I expected…7.2% conversion from organic SEO? Wow. I’m surely gonna have to do some reading into the source material provided.
December 3rd, 2011 at 3:27 pm
These numbers are outlandishly high and probably included branded search terms. Not a good benchmark for people new to search. Sanity check using a rate of .5%-1.5% for non-branded search, but performance depends on a host of factors.