Paid Ad Versus Organic Listing – Survey Results Surprise

Our friends at Ignite Visibility (IV) have shared their eCommerce Marketing Study with us, and it has some interesting findings for all businesses keen to grow their eCommerce sales.

Let’s start with our article title: paid adverts versus organic search – which link do consumers click to shop online?

Paid Ad Vs Organic Result

While most businesses would prefer to hear that an organic listing ranks much higher with the consumer when searching for a product or service, in the survey of 1000 survey respondents, paid ads ranked nearly as high as organic results.

50/50

49.5% of the 1000 respondents said they would click an ad first versus 50.5% choosing an organic result. What can businesses derive from this is both strategies are equally relevant for search marketing.

Achieving a first page rank in organic search can take a lot of hard work and time, whereas, with a substantial budget, you can achieve the same result with paid advertising. However, ongoing, it will be easier to maintain the organic result. Therefore, cost less than the advertising budget needed for paid advertising.

Most businesses keen to grow their eCommerce sales will do both the paid advertising and invest in SEO strategies to sustain a top organic result.

Ads On Websites Preferred

A revelation from the survey is that ads presented on websites are preferred over ads presented on Social or search engine results.

Businesses need to be cognizant of where their paid ads are displaying. Engage an Adwords expert, but make sure your ads display on websites as often as they do on Google and social platforms.

Plus, on social, your ads should target consumers on the social platforms they prefer. Facebook ranks higher than other social platforms for ads; however, if your targeted audience spends more time on LinkedIn, it will make sense to use your social ad spend there.

Key Drivers For Purchasing Conversion

Do you prefer loyalty points, gift card or discounts? Marketing and sales initiatives can be a lot easier when you know what motivates your customers to come back to buy from your business.

Site Speed

The Ignite Visibility study suggests there is no one clear leader in incentives and that fast site speed can be what it takes to win over a customer. We all know slow page load is a big turn off and the bounce rate metric can be a good indication all is not well on either the entire site or some parts of it.

However, there are many ways of looking at the bounce rate. Google says:

Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.

Depending on where your visitor arrives on your site, you’ll be happier when your visitors spend longer on the page when they’re reading your blog post. However, you’ll be equally pleased if the visitor spends less time on a product page before moving to the checkout.

If the visitor leaves the product page too quickly without goes to the checkout, however, then you know there’s a problem with the page, and it’s likely to be a slow loading of the page contents.

Do you know how fast your site’s contents load and, more specifically, the pages your customers visit, including your store and payment gateway?

Investing in site speed improvements is a continuous requirement. In much the same way a racing car engineer looks for ways to increase the top-end speed, your website team should do likewise with your website.

Tweaking the content, especially if there are videos and lots of images, adding, updating or removing plugins, and upgrading your hosting plan as and when required are a few of the initiatives that can reduce the time a site takes to load for the customer.

Remember increasing page speed by a few seconds will keep more customers on your site for longer.

Aesthetics

However, whatever you do remember, your site does need to be attractive, so your web team really do have a balancing act where form, function and aesthetics are equally relevant to the engagement and conversion of customers.

There are other incentives besides a good looking fast site that wow the consumer for their initial and repeat business.

Free-To-The-Door

Free shipping is a winner, and most consumers respond well to it, even for small purchases where the shipping fee would be just a few dollars.

Do whatever you can to give your customer the free-to-the-door experience every time they shop online.

Summary

Insights from surveys like the eCommerce marketing study prove there is still a lot to learn about consumers and how they shop online. In this post, we’ve mentioned a few of them.

Marketers love eCommerce businesses – it’s an exciting niche where learning is neverending, and strategies taken deliver real progress measured by more sales.