Natural search vs paid search spend & traffic share for big brand retailers

Internet marketing firm Conductor has carried out some research (using Spyfu) to see what proportion of traffic to the top 10 big-box US retailers is coming from paid search compared to natural search.

In summary, they are spending a lot on paid search and natural search is still performing better in a number of cases. Of course the natural search traffic will include a lot of brand search (more than PPC) but it’s still interesting to see.

Collectively they are spending $678,000 per day on paid search which actually seems quite low to me – it works out at around £40k per day which for a big retailer isn’t much. Target for example spent $297,000 per day on PPC according to this study.

I always like to refer people to this chart from SEOmoz showing the distribution between natural search spend and paid search spend compared to the share of clicks each receives. I wonder what Target would say if somebody quoted $297,000 per day for natural search?

BY Patrick Altoft AT 9:50am ON Wednesday, 2 December 2009

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+