PPC Case Study
Midwest Aqua Care Inc.
Our client invests in SEO all year and heavily in PPC during their short season of the summer months. They are contstantly adding and improving content to provide research information with SEO quality. (Example of a content page for Problem Cattails)
These pages provide content to help the do it yourselfer make a decision about their particular weed problem. Obviously we provide visitors with an opportunity to research and then purchase everything they need directly from us.
About them:
- They sell aquatic weed control products nationwide.
- Seasonal products with an online point of purchase.
- Big ticket prices ranging from $11 - $1,600 per item.
- Small company, 1 storefront in suburban Minneapolis.
- A mature domain since 2001.
We track an exceptional amount of data and trace traffic from all initial referrers (filtering PPC from organic) through their visit to completion of purchase.
We are able to compare conversion rates based upon initial referrer. The following table shows the conversion rates of visitors reaching the website to a completed sale. Sample taken across a week in June 2006. Numbers shown are by initial referrer, visitors arriving initially by PPC and subsequently arriving by bookmark will fall into the PPC group.
Statistics by nature contain a margin of error, actual results may vary:
| Initial Referrer | Conversion % |
| All | 3.1% |
| None | 1.7% |
| All search engines | 3.6% |
| Google all | 5.1% |
| Google Organic | 7% |
| Google PPC | 3.5% |
| Yahoo all | 1.8% |
| Yahoo Organic | 13% |
| Yahoo PPC | 0% |
General findings not necessarily reflected in this case study and purely the opinion of First Scribe:
- Our findings are that Google PPC traffic is better than the
other PPC vendors. We avoid those such as QwestDex and Enhance
Interactive as they do not offer us the pricing, traffic and/or
control offered by direct engines.
- Yahoo and AOL users are more likely to type a website address
into the search window versus the address bar, skewing the numbers
slightly. It can be a good idea to bid on your name and URL in
certain cases.
- All PPC is fraught with click fraud. We find more in Yahoo
than Google. We have seen cases where third party PPC vendors
have sent more fraud than traffic.
- Avoid signing long-term PPC contracts. It's usually a sign to take your business elsewhere.
