Quality of Leads on Organic vs PPC

[CLTMichael]

Great debate and thank you Tim for your data.

[Malok]

I think all of the answers provided are correct thus far, but are just having a different take on how to answer your question.


Morgan: He based his answer on trying to identify which would do better for specific scenarios. Do a test, comparing apples to apples for organic & PPC.
I do agree with his assessment that all things being equal, that organic & PPC should have about the same quality of leads. (That of course is assuming, that the organic actually gets enough visibility that it actually gets seen in the first place - cause even the most awful PPC effort is still likely to get seen at least some unless you drop the budget down to nothing.)

Me: I based my answer from a broader perspective that is less apple to apple scenario based, and more of a general market overview. Lots of agents shoot for niches for their PPC efforts. When they make statements like "My XYZ street townhome PPC is getting XX% conversion", its really not fair to compare that hyper focused niche to what someone else is doing for a broad organic search (like <city> real estate / homes for sale) from a conversion perspective.

Tim: Basically mirrored what I stated. His PPC effort appears to be broader in scope than his organic, and as such his organic results for him, are likely to be much higher quality.

[Joelrunner]

I don't have detailed notes like some of the others, but that's probably the best info you'll get. Getting statistically valid information would require an apples to apples comparison of two identical websites targeting the exact same keywords - one targeting 100% organic, and one targeting PPC with the entire site no-indexed so it doesn't get any organic traffic (and they'd have to have the exact same rankings for each of those keywords.)

I will say that there are a lot of cases where you're not even allowed to get PPC traffic, but that traffic is as laser targeted as possible.
Those examples include neighborhood level searches where the visitors are HIGHLY qualified visitors, but they represent too low a volume to even be able to bid on via PPC. Even better examples include specific property searches which are impossible to bid on via PPC, but quite easy to rank for via organic.

That's definitely a case where organic takes the cake.