Perpetual Traffic Formula Review
The first ORGANIC (i.e. non-sponsored listing) usually receives 41 – 45% of the available traffic, and the second ORGANIC result receives 11 – 18% of the available traffic…
… 10 – 20 TIMES the amount of clicks as the first PAID listing.
I’ll say that again…10 – 20 TIMES more traffic than the top paid listing! Just to put that into perspective… If you’re getting 100 clicks a day from Google AdWords, your competitor who’s ranking #1 organically is getting 1000 – 2000 clicks a day! The Perpetual Traffic Formula Report by Ryan Deiss
Oh yeah… And Their Traffic (Unlike Yours) Is FREE! But what about all your competitors who are listed lower down on the page…you’re at least beating them, right? Not necessarily…
While SEO experts disagree somewhat on the exact breakdown of clicks, the screenshot below illustrates the general consensus based on our research: [ Percentage of clicks received by positions 3 - 10.
Source: http://training.seobook.com/google-ranking-value ]
So based on these numbers, the person sitting at result #3 is still getting 2X – 3X more traffic than you. And the competitors in positions 4 – 9 are getting as much traffic as you…even you hold the #1 spot in the paid results! And again, none of them are having to pay for their traffic… OUCH!!
The Perpetual Traffic Report by Ryan Deiss
But It Wasn’t Always Like This… When Google AdWords first came on the scene, clicks on the sponsored links were through the roof! In fact, most Google users didn’t know there was a difference between the organic listings on the left and the paid listings on the right, so by some estimates the paid listings received as much as 30% of the clicks. By 2008 this number had dropped to 10.5% according to Enquisite.com (see chart on the left, below)…
…and by 2009 the percentage of clicks to paid listings was down to 7.5%. (Source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2009/05/paid_search_traffic_share_down_1.html)
And the Decline Continues… Today the percentages are even lower, with the sponsored (i.e. “Paid) results generating just 4 – 5% of the total clicks on the page: And while experts may argue over the exact percentages, none of that really matters. What does matter is that the percentage of clicks to sponsored search listings are on a decline, and few expect it to rebound. But to anyone familiar with marketing history, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise…
The Perpetual Traffic Report by Ryan Deiss
History Repeats Itself (Again) In the early days of the Internet, banner ads ruled online marketing. But as Internet users became more and more familiar with banner ads, click-through rates plummeted and the medium took a massive hit. This phenomena was so pervasive, in fact, that a new term, “banner blindness”, was created to describe it. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness )
[ These heatmap studies prove that “banner blindness” is a very real phenomena. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements. Note the complete lack of red and yellow on the banner ads (as denoted by the green boxes).
Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html ]
Now the same thing is happening with Google AdWords ads according to a recent study by MarketingSherpa.com.
If you look at the screenshot on the next page, you’ll see that while the two sponsored ads above the organic listings do get some attention, the ads on the right receive almost zero attention from the viewers.
The Perpetual Traffic Report by Ryan Deiss
The vast majority of the fixation is on the first two organic listings, with results 3 – 8 still receiving as much (or more!) attention as the top paid listings:
[ Heatmap study showing the effect of “banner blindness” on Google AdWords ads. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the ads after the study to highlight the advertisements. Note that the ads on the right receive almost no attention, and the two ads at the top receive little compared to the first organic listing. Source: http://www.marketingsherpa.com ]
Hopefully by now I’ve convinced you that every day, more and more Google users are shifting their focus away from PPC and toward organic search. In other words…
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