Organic VS Paid Traffic: Which is More Profitable?
In the age of highly competitive digital marketing, getting your target audience’s attention would entail conscious efforts from your business.
As a start, you can setup a digital marketing team that only focuses on different strategies such as content, paid, and SEO, to name a few. However, marketers face a dilemma whether which strategy to really prioritize and invest on.
One of the most heated conversations you’ve probably heard of is organic versus paid traffic. Before finally deciding on which strategy to use, you should first establish the differences between the two.
Organic vs. Paid Traffic
At the very top, organic means your visitors or target audience come to you freely. This is at their own will. As an example, you build a website for your business to make it the central hub of all things connected to your business—business background, history, product or service information, blog, and contact channels.
Naturally, your blog’s topics should be related to your business. This is where you share relevant and valuable information to your visitors. Through time, you’ll be able to establish yourself as a reliable source for all the things they need. Also, your visitors would want to share the good information they just found out through social media, or if they have a blog of their own, they might even repost it and link to your site.
The more shares and links you get, the more that your search ranking will improve. At the bottom, this is what organic traffic is all about. For a well-executed organic strategy, it usually takes three to six months before you reap the fruit of your labor.
On the other hand, paid traffic obviously requires you to shell out a budget to get website traffic. Surely, you’ve seen those “sponsored,” “suggested,” and “ad” markings in your social media feed or search results. These ads are sometimes placed on top of the search results or highlighted in a certain way while you’re scrolling.
Paid will surely get you the traffic that you need today, as your landing pages will rank better and ultimately affect your number of conversions.
In line with that, getting your business involved with paid doesn’t require a business website. By simply enabling the ad to drive them to your product or service’s purchase page, your business will generate revenue right away. This is called “offers” in the marketing industry.
Looking at Profitability
At first glance, you’ll notice that paid traffic gives you the quickest chance to gain profit. It puts your marketing strategies at a boosting pad. But, of course, you need to consider your business’ budget first.
Will you be able to sustain it in the long run? Will your other marketing strategies coincide seamlessly to paid?
Since you’ll be dealing with proper ad targeting, you’ll also encounter lots of data that need to be organized and analyzed correctly. To put things into perspective, a study conducted by Resolution Media and Kenshoo about the Imaging and Printing Group of Hewlett-Packard showed that organic recorded a 3.2% higher net revenue per visit than organic search.
It’s important to take note that the net revenue per visit was determined by comparing numbers from paid cost and paid revenue. The result of that paid equation was then put side by side with the numbers from revenue per organic visit.
One thing mentioned in the study is the interesting changes of percentages when the rankings are different. People are still more likely to click on the organic when it’s ranked number one even if there’s a paid ad from the same business above it. Obviously, organic search rankings number two to ten and below would lead people to click the paid ad on top.
Based on the study, paid traffic is more profitable than organic traffic. However, you need to combine organic and paid to have an all-around marketing plan. The management of your paid strategy is also crucial to the success of its execution.
Inbound marketers would favor organic, but they have also seen the benefits of paid. Tools such as HubSpot and social media ads allow them to appreciate the outcome when these two are combined. Organic traffic is more cost-effective, but paid can also save you from huge costs when done strategically.
Key Takeaways
Whether you choose organic or paid to get traffic, you still have to know your target audience head-to- toe. This will help you create more focused content or target the right people with your ads. Demand generation marketing is the trend right now where you tailor fit to the tiniest detail your marketing strategies.
As marketers, you should be familiar with paid and organic individually before you make these two work together. A lopsided effort on one of these might harm your business than actually producing likable
results.
