Traffic Report

As an online marketer, what keeps you up at night? For a lot of us it's the debate over whether to invest our limited promotional budget in search engine optimization or pay per click to achieve the highest ROI.

You've probably heard SEO agencies tout the superiority of SEO over PPC as a means of providing the best quality leads without having to pay for clicks. And you've probably also heard PPC agencies discount the value of an SEO investment due to the lack of control and a limited ability to respond to mysterious algorithm changes.

An important part of the debate that's largely ignored is the quality of organic (non-paid) vs. paid visitors. Do visitors from organic listings behave differently than those who arrived at your Web site through a PPC ad? In general, which type of visitor is more inclined to buy? Is there any demonstrable and consistent relationship between how visitors arrive at your site and their likelihood to buy?

Since visitors from different traffic sources may have different motivations, behaviors and buying characteristics, marketers need to understand how to maximize each visitor's value based on the way they got to the site.

Along with organic and paid listings, visitors may arrive at your site by typing in your URL, accessing an existing bookmark or clicking a link on a completely different site or e-mail promotion.

To better understand how traffic source affects visitor purchase behavior, Engine Ready Inc. studied 27 companies over a two-year period. We were most interested in evaluating visitors' likelihood to convert to being customers, the amount spent by each visitor, and their engagement and behavior.

Categories analyzed by traffic source included average order value, bounce rate, conversion rate, value per visitor, average time spent on site, average number of page views per visit, and average length of time spent on each page viewed.

A common thread in the study was that visitors who arrived directly or via a bookmark stayed longer, viewed more pages, were more likely to purchase and more likely to spend a higher dollar amount than visitors from other sources. Assuming, then, that a much larger percentage of these people visited the site before, then it becomes quite clear — and perhaps not too surprising — that repeat visitors are more valuable than new ones. In fact, measuring an average sales dollar value per visit, we found these visitors more than four times as valuable ($5.69/visit) as those who arrived at the site via an organic listing ($1.35/visit).

These results reinforce the importance of providing solid reasons to compelvisitors to return often to your Web site.

Inbound links to a site from other domains are beneficial both for SEO and driving additional quality traffic. We found that visitors coming from other domains and e-mails had the second-highest value per visitor at $5.01. Interestingly, these visitors had the second highest conversion rate (3%) and average order value ($168.45). However, they also tended to bounce off the landing page at the highest rate (48.7%) of all sources.

On an individual basis, many factors determine how well visitors from a search engine will convert. Looking at the big picture across our entire sample showed that prospects drawn from PPC ads outperformed those from organic listings in every category except average number of page views per visit. Overall, we found that the average sales-dollar value per visitor arriving from a PPC ad was $1.91, or 41% higher than that of someone from an organic listing.

Additionally, paid traffic converted at a 20% higher rate and experienced an average order value 18% above that of organic traffic.

Our study showed that, dollar for dollar of marketing investment, paid traffic returned a higher percentage than organic listings did.

Results of our engagement metrics closely mirrored those of our ROI metrics. Direct access/bookmark traffic averaged 312 seconds per visit, 46% longer than organic visitors who remained on the site the shortest amount of time. As far as average number of page views per visit, again direct access/bookmark traffic took the lead at 5.5 pages, 45% more than the lowest category, organic visitors.

A significant finding was the importance of tracking and analyzing site metrics when shaping marketing strategy, and ensuring that measurements align with strategic goals. Although we noted fairly consistent trends within our sample, variations will occur based on market and competitive environment.

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BRIAN LEWIS (brian@engineready.com) is vice president of marketing at San Diego-based software maker Engine Ready Inc.

Average Order Value

Referring source
Paid search	$138.04
Organic search	$117.09
Direct access	$170.32
Other referring sites	$168.45
Source: Engine Ready Inc.