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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 into SEO or PPC to achieve the highest return on our marketing investment. 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 ability to respond to mysterious algorithm changes.
An important part of the debate that’s largely ignored is the quality of organic versus paid visitors. Do visitors from organic listings behave differently than those who arrived at your site via a PPC ad? In general, which type of visitor is most likely to buy? Is there any demonstrable and consistent relationship between how a visitor arrives 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 best to maximize the value of each visitor based on how they arrived at the site. Along with organic and paid listings in the search engines, visitors may also arrive at your site by typing in your URL, accessing an existing bookmark to your site or from a link on a completely different website or email promotion.
To better understand how traffic source impacts visitor purchase behavior, Engine Ready studied 27 companies during a 2-year period measuring visitor metrics by traffic source. The purpose of this study was threefold:
1. Gain an understanding of how visitors behave based on how they arrived at your site
2. Provide insights into customizing the visitor experience based on the visitor’s traffic source
3. Offer insights on how to best leverage your online marketing budgets among the four main traffic sources: SEO, PPC, inbound linking, or branding.
The characteristics we were most interested in evaluating consisted of 3 primary areas related to both ROI and brand awareness:
1. Likelihood to convert a customer
2. Amount of spend by the visitor
3. Engagement and visitor behavior
Specifically we analyzed the following categories by traffic source:
- Average order value
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Value per visitor (sales divided by visit)
- Average time spent on site
- Average number of page views per visit
- Average length of time spent on each page viewed
The Most Productive Visitor
A common thread throughout all of our research was that visitors arriving via direct access or a bookmark stay longer, view more pages, are more likely to purchase and more likely to spend a higher dollar amount than visitors from other sources. Since the only way a visitor could arrive via a bookmark is from a previous visit to your site, a primary reason supporting these findings is that many of these visitors in the direct access/bookmark category have visited the site previously, and were probably familiar with the company’s product or service offerings.
Assuming then that a much larger percentage of this group of visitors visited the site before (compared to other sources), then it becomes quite clear, and perhaps not too surprising, that repeat visitors are more valuable than new visitors. In fact, measuring an average sales dollar value per visit, we found that this group of visitor was over 4 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 reasons to compel your visitors to return often to your site.
The Value of Inbound links beyond SEO
Inbound links to a site from other domains are both beneficial for SEO as well as driving additional quality traffic. And we found that visitors arriving from other domains and emails had the second highest value per visitor at $5.01. Interestingly, these visitors had the second highest conversion rate (3.0%) and average order value ($168.45), however, they also tended to bounce off of the landing page at the highest rate (48.7%) of all sources.
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