According to a recent article over at Internet Retailer paid search has a slight advantage.  But before you start increasing your paid search budget, our CTO(Chief Thinking Officer) John Quarto-vonTivadar chimes in with his questions about these numbers and their implications…

Imagine that, if you will: given the tremendous amounts of money spent on paid search (huge! And costs are actually going up!), all it manages to do is achieve a Scrooge-ish +9% bump over organic search. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, you may well get a bigger conversion bang for the buck by investing in an organically planned architecture of scent, relevance and persuasion — which is what ends up scoring so well in organic search anyway — than in "buying" traffic for an otherwise cow-pathed site.

Hmmmmmmmmmm, very interesting.

Get into John’s scientific head for yourself and read his entire post.