

Ask HN: How much do you rely on Google Adword vs. organic growth? - youngdev

Just curious how many of you guys rely on PPC systems like google, fb, or bing vs. growing traffic organically?<p>Is one preferred over the other?
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itsprofitbaron
When comparing SEO to PPC the easiest comparison is to look at how PPC has
instant results & can generate visitors early in a site launch in comparison
to SEO. Similarly in terms of managing budget you can manage your budget and
measure your ROI much more easily with PPC over SEO which often takes a much
more long term approach (especially if you're going after generic competitive
keywords)

\- 86% of web searchers trust SEO listings more than sponsored PPC listings
AND 85% of clicks resulting from a search are on the organic links rather than
the paid ads.

\- Although only 50% of web searchers are aware of the difference between
organic and paid search results

However, PPC use declined 60% between 2007 and 2010 AND more importantly 50%
of people arriving at a retailers site from paid ads are more likely to buy
than those who came from an organic link.

In terms of selecting one method over the other then I know someone personally
who runs a very successful bootstrapped ecommerce company which started on
eBay and has since expanded into real stores - he now has over 100 employees &
makes tens of millions in profit per year. His whole business has been
generated via PPC although recently he has started doing SEO by hiring some in
house SEO staff.

However, ideally you should be looking at implementing _both_ strategies. SEO
and PPC are both important & if you have an PPC ad slot and are #1 on Google
then you have 2 of the first few results a user clicks on & from my experience
- the first 5 results take up 88.1% of all clicks[1]

Statistics Used From: [http://killerinfographics.submitinfographics.com/wp-
content/...](http://killerinfographics.submitinfographics.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/10/SEOvsPPC.jpg)

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3766000>

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helen842000
My partner and I always thought that paid is great to start with then organic
traffic should take over.

We have real difficulty getting results from organic traffic. We now are
regularly number 1 or 2 on google organic search for our exact key phrase.
We're seeing very little traffic and zero enquiries which is very
disheartening.

However if we run a PPC campaign for the same keyphrase we get 20 - 50
enquiries per day (dependant on our budget) and 5 to 10 enquiries.

Our paid ad is above our own organic listing and the paid wins hands down
every time. If we stop the ads, another ad beats us to the click.

I think ads are being clicked far more than we realise.

We would love to rely on organic traffic but only paid traffic gets results.

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ig1
It depends on your business, work out what the average revenue per visitor is
and from that derive how much you'd be willing to pay for an extra visitor.

If that amount is greater than the cost of PPC advertising then using PPC is a
no-brainer.

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Toph
I use both. Rather than rely on one or the other, they each have their own
uses for specific things. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't.
Reasoning varies a lot.

I should note that I don't think of organic traffic as purely SEO.

