Balance between Paid and Search

Quotes

• “Generally, I am looking to drive 70 -80% of my site traffic through organic and about 20 -30% occurring with paid. In terms of balance, if were looking at the traditional funnel, whats typical for us is about 70% of our top funnel is coming from organic traffic.” -Doug

• “Where we find paid to be really successful for us is on one-off informational topics. We tend to see a lot of performance there. Its also great if we are looking to get into an area that we dont have a lot of traction with. Itsa hell of a great way to test content as well prior to developing organic or evergreen content.” -Doug

• “I feel like paid, most of the time ends up being an addictive drug for marketing executives where they understand that they can put a certain amount of budget and they start to see business results but they are always wanting to put their foot down on the throttle and start to scale it. At some point, it becomes incredibly difficult because it becomes capital-intensive or youre starting to see diminishing returns.” -Doug

• “There is this macro trend which is this point of diminishing returns to the industry in general and thats been fairly happening since the early 2010s. Specifically, we are seeing that this is happening because the average increase in spend year after year has been declining. It used to be 20% plus and now its about 7% growth.” -Doug

• “You can fairly and quickly establish an ROI for a given set of keywords and whats typical for us marketers is that theyve made an attempt at really gaining that SEO ground at some point or very possibly you have content thats floating at the 6th, 7th, 8th position maybe even on page 2, that can be optimized.” -Doug

• “When youre sitting and looking at your keyword strategy and youre realizing that you are ranking outside of the top positions for what you think to be pretty impactful, potential keywords, if youre seeing good traffic and conversion rates from a placement that is not on page 1 or down at the bottom of it, you can use your performance marketing campaigns to try to understand whether its a worthy effort to continue to optimize that page.” -Ben

• “I think its helpful to understand that ultimately, the clickthrough rates diminish very quickly and I think this is true for both paid and organic results. But the difference between how the consumers react is pretty clear. 70 -80% of all searchers ignore paid ads and they focus only on organic results.” -Doug

• “We also know that there is a lot of reward for people that actually can achieve that top spot. It depends on the category but clickthrough rates for the number one SERP on the organic spot, 52%. You look at the page its somewhere around 7%.” -Doug

• “If you are comparing your performance marketing campaigns and you want to understand the value of a given keyword to you and you already use performance marketing to understand how important that page is. Really what you are comparing is, the performance marketing efforts are going to get you a 7% conversion rate which is the equivalent way of saying, Im going to have a top 5 placement in search.” -Doug

• “If you are outside of the top 5, you can use your performance marketing budget to evaluate if your campaigns are going to be worth optimizing.” -Doug

• “What I dont want to do is give the impression that paid is bad, organic is good because the flip of that is, it took a hell of a long time and a lot of effort to invest in creating the content and publishing into the site.” -Doug

• “When youre going after a unique keyword set that you currently dont own, always start with paid.” -Doug

• “Half of the site traffic globally is generated through organic but every business has a slightly different nuance. If you are B2B, youre likely to be closer to that 70/30 ratio. Part of it has to do with the size of your paid budget and part of it has to do with your relative level of sophistication.” -Doug