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From Google – Paid clicks more likely to convert

Posted: October 27, 2008

Google and Compete did a joint retail study examining the role of search in retail, and they have a webinar about the findings.

One retail study they were involved with started that in 7 out of 8 categories they tested, paid clicks were 50% more likely to convert than organic clicks.

Personally, I’ve always felt paid should convert higher for two reasons:

You get to choose your keywords. You can show in natural results for terms unrelated to your products/services. For paid, the relevance should be higher.
Many consumers know they are ads. Often we click on natural when we’re surfing/researching, and ads when we’re more in the mood for buying or researching a future purchase.

If you are in the retail industry (or a paid search manager), the webinar is definitely worth watching.

The note above about the conversions comes on the ‘Key Findings’ slide if you’d like to jump to that point and listen. Then jump to the slide ‘Paid clicks are more likely to convert’ to view the chart.

Local Info

The other chart that most of us involved in local will be interested in is the ‘In-store purchases’ near the end of the presentation. “Up to 43% of of online shoppers purchase in-store”. That number changes a lot depending on who you are talking to; however, this study does show a chart of in-store purchase percentage by a few verticals, which is useful.

Affiliate & Retail Info

Slide ‘many people click now and buy later’ shows a chart of how much time occurs between initial search and purchase time. It’s common to see one to two weeks pass. If you’re an affiliate with a same day or one week cookie, this is important to understand in your driving traffic to a site where you might not gain the commission.

The Actual Study

It’s an adobe webinar so you will need flash installed to view it:

Google retail industry webinar.

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Related Information:

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Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Google AdWords

Comments

One Response to “From Google – Paid clicks more likely to convert”

Phil on October 29th, 2008 2:33 pm

lmao…sounds like a Google study…although I think its because at the PPC level folks go after the model number…and when I’m looking to buy something I type in the model number and most likely there is a PPC ad ready for me…

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