By Britnee Nguyen

When it comes to search engines, some companies pay for pay-per-click advertising because they believe they’d have a better chance of getting users to click on those links, while others rely on organic search results. So what is the best strategy to use when advertising on-line through search engines?

A recent study done by Engine Ready, claims that visitors going to an on-line retailer’s website from a paid search ad are 50 percent more likely to make a purchase compared to visitor coming from a n organic search result. To come to this conclusion, they tracked 20.8 million visits to 26 different online retail sites for a year. They found that paid search visitors typically made a purchase more than those who visited through organic searches. The overall conversation rate from paid search was 2.03% while the organic search was 1.26%.

While these findings lean toward paid search ads as being more effective, there is another factor that must be recognized. This study was solely based on the last click of the visitor, and doesn’t take in account the clicks that occurred before that to get the person to make that purchase.

A lot could happen between the first and last click of a user. When looking only at the last click, it doesn’t take into the full account of how users interact with different websites before making a purchase.

Basically, paid search and search engine optimization have their benefits and are both useful when doing on-line marketing. Some companies may get more clicks from their pay-per-click ads, while others get more from their organic search results. Both tactics are definitely effective in getting a company’s website higher up on the search engines, but there is a fine line in determining which tactic is better. They are both beneficial, so you might as well give both a trial time to see which works better for your own situation.