[omarchowdhury]

This person obviously does not understand the value in capturing BOTH organic search visitors and paid search visitors.

Let us say 30% of the searchers for "auto insurance" click on Geico's organic search listing. What about the other 70%? Some of them click on other organic search listings, some of them will click only on other paid search listings, some of them will click on a combination of listings (comparing).

It would only make sense for Geico to buy paid search listings as well - to capture SOME of that other 70% that do not click on their organic listing.

Simply, ranking organically and buying keywords will only increase the chance for a potential customer to find your site. And with an industry as competitive as car insurance, if Geico doesn't spend that $90MM to acquire new visitors someone else will.

Also I highly doubt the accuracy of the $90MM figure as Spyfu's database is only an estimate.

Finally let's not forget this article also doubles as a marketing material for Tipping Point Labs, I'm sure they agree they are "expert story-tellers" who completely "understand online content marketing".

[tplDrew2]

Thanks Omar. I think you make some great points. However, as much as google would like you to believe that AdWord buys are more successful than the top ten organic search results, that's just not the case. Organic search results have higher conversion rates than adword buys. Hands down. I'll give you the SpyFu inaccuracy, however, it's some insight into adword spending. Also, although the post helps market tippingpoint, we're much more eager to spark a debate and engage in an active dialogue. Thanks again for your insight.

[omarchowdhury]

How can you say that paid search traffic converts less than organic search traffic? The beauty of paid search traffic is being able to target the RIGHT keywords for the RIGHT customer and the RIGHT time.

It is inherently wrong to say paid search traffic converts worse than organic search traffic because different variables will change the outcome (conversion rate). Those variables can be keywords, negative keywords, type of keyword matching, ad copy, time of day, landing page, geography, industry, product. I can change these variables and make the paid traffic convert poorly compared to the organic visitors. I can also tweak these variables and have my paid traffic converting much better than organic traffic!

What is my point? The data that you used to draw your conclusion, that organic is better than paid, was simply data from a poorly converting paid search campaign. Not to worry though, most paid search campaigns are full of flaws because a lack of understanding of the Adwords system.

Furthermore, Google does not want me to "believe" anything. I have websites that rank organically AND which receive paid search traffic (Google). I have my own data to draw conclusions.