PPC/Natural Split

[MattUK]

In my experince the split between searchers visiting a natural result and a PPC result in Google is around 60/40 or more in favour of natural search.

However on a site that I'm monitoring Google analytics seems to showing a far superior number of visitors from the PPC listsings on keywords that are both listed in the top 1 or 2 results. Any ideas what may be causing this, I'm wondering if there is anything that may be skewing the results or if this indeed the case.

[Mel66]

At my old company, we saw this frequently with many top keywords. Way more PPC traffic than SEO, and way more conversions too - even for terms on which we were fairly well ranked. I always chalked it up to the control you have over PPC messaging - our ads were tested and vetted for maximum clicks & conversions. You don't have that kind of control over organic messaging.

I think this is the exception rather than the rule, but I have seen it.

[beu]

In the past, I've found analytics to be the culprit in many cases like this one.

I'd start out by checking your "top exit pages". You want to verify that pages linked to by those pages contain analytics code and are free from redirects. Also, check the "navigation summary" and be sure the data there seems logical. Of your "traffic sources" what percent is from direct traffic?

[metasynman]

Is your site a B2B site? I can't even remember where I saw it, but I just read the results of a study the other day that said B2B customers tend to click more on the paid links than organic, while consumer-focused searches tend to see more clicks from organic than paid. Not sure if this fits your case, but if it's not just analytics error variance, it might help explain it.