Re: Paid Search v. Organic Search Traffic Analysis
Asked by LocalSEOGuide

Question:
Anyone know how to determine how much of a competitor's traffic comes from paid search/ads v. organic search?

My Lengthy Response:

Personally, I like to take a more blue ocean strategy and come up with cool ideas and concepts that are value based rather than running marketing campaigns as reactions to competitors. Most of what needs to be done to make an online marketing campaign successful is fairly straight forward and can be developed without this level of intimate competitive knowledge.

That being said, here are your 3 major options:
(I do not condone nor vilify any of these tactics and simply present them as options)

1. Competitive Keyword Analysis tools
In the bottom of this post, there are some options. Basically, use this to figure out what they are bidding on. Based on their estimates, you should be able to estimate the PPC traffic they pull in.

2. Bribery and Subterfuge
Identify who their webmaster is and bribe them for access to or a download of their log files. You can do the same thing with their web hosting company. If you know how to do a command line trace, you can quickly figure out where they are hosting their sites. At that point its just a matter of convincing the (not paid enough to care) support guy to email you the log files for "that new client of yours".

If you don't think this is possible, I recently had the Network Solutions representative alter the DNS records for a client of mine without any login or password data. I simply called up like the angry marketer I was and demanded the change on behalf of my client. The guy never even asked what my name was. (It was my client and a legitimate DNS change)

3. Market Research Companies
Companies like Hit-wise and Jupiter Media essentially bribe ISPS for access to their data and can more legitimately do this kind of research for you. They are not cheap.

Not Satisfied? Check out this post a wrote almost 2 years ago blogging from PubCon Boston.