Mozilla Marketing

Organic and Paid Search – How Opposites Interact

By DR ⋅ December 20, 2007 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Recently, Ken and I set out to answer a question about our search program: how does organic search (meaning results in a search engine that are not sponsored) interact with paid search (those sponsored results that you see at the top or along the side of search engine results)? More specifically, would people click on organic listings for Mozilla related results if no paid search listings appeared? And, how does that ultimately affect the number of downloads of Firefox?

First, a little background; readers of this blog probably know that Mozilla participates in paid search advertising with the major search engines. Roughly 10% of all Firefox downloads are a direct result of paid search marketing. And the cost effectiveness of these downloads through paid search has been steadily, if not dramatically, improving during the fall.

Over the last couple weeks, we ran an experiment in which we turned off paid search on alternating days. Ken has more information about methodology, but I wanted to report on some of the really interesting findings as a result of our test.

Below is a chart depicting the differences in clicks for the test:

It turns out that there is a large degree of overlap with paid search and organic search.

When we run paid search, we receive a boost of about 10% in terms of click volume. In other words, if we did not run any paid search engine advertising, we would receive about 90% of the clicks that we would get from running both.

Conclusion #1: For Mozilla, there is a large amount of overlap (in terms of clicks) for organic and paid search

A study this past summer from Enquiro Search Solutions found some related, interesting results. For branded terms (for example “Firefox”), presence at the top of both organic listings and paid listings together does seem to help spur action — to the tune of a 7% boost (in the study’s case this action was purchase intent; in our case it would be download intent). This 7% figure is interesting as it’s in the ballpark of our 10% figure above. You can download the complete white paper here (after registering for free) to see more of the findings.

Things get a little more interesting when we look at the effect that this has on directly driving downloads. When we ran both paid and organic search at the same time, we increased the number of downloads in the search channel by about 35%. The conversion rate (defined as a click on a search listing which results in a download of Firefox) is 3% better when we run both.

Conclusion #2: Running paid search on high ranking branded terms improves conversion compared to not running paid search.

You could imagine why this would be the case. A user enlists their favorite search engine and types in a branded term, and sees a results page that has both paid and unpaid listings at or near the top. The user may think that seeing multiple results confirms that they are on the right track. Or perhaps seeing the paid advertisement reinforces, through the ad copy, the positive attributes of the organic (unpaid) listing.

So which key word terms are driving the bulk of these overlapping clicks? It seems that it is largely driven by branded terms, and specifically the term “firefox”. If you type in “firefox” in just about any top search engine, a Mozilla page comes out at the top of the list. However, type in a non-branded term like “browser” and a Mozilla page, while still highly ranked, does not have the top spot (thanks Wikipedia!). Mozilla’s organic search optimization (SEO) is quite good – and we’re looking at ways to get even better.

Some other open ended questions to ponder from this test:

• Are users that download Firefox via paid search more valuable later on in the funnel than their organic counterparts? In other words, do those users end up being more active Firefox users?
• How do we evaluate the different costs associated with acquiring users through different channels? Ken has some good thoughts around marginal costs of acquiring users that I’d encourage you to read
• Are all branded terms created equal? What is the interplay among different branded terms with organic and paid search?

While this is just an initial test, these findings are certainly surprising — we’re going to continue exploring these questions to figure out how we can make our search engine marketing as successful as possible. These results are sure to vary among different industries and different companies. I’d love to hear your thoughts about your search campaign’s relationship between organic and paid and what mix you’ve found to be successful.