Did you ever get the feeling that you left money of the table because you needed to spend money to make more money - but you didn't know how much to spend or how much you'd miss out if you didn't spend it?

I read a post today in Andrew Goodman's blog - Traffick - titled Relative Complexities of Paid and Organic Search, and Implications for Marketing Effectiveness were Andrew says Paid Search traffic returns superior ROI to the same about of Organic Search Traffic ROI.

I agree that  Paid Search superior to Organic for ROI - Traffik and believe Paid Search is 4 times more effective, visitor to visitor, than Organic Search Traffic - at least, given the stats below.

In fact, it's entirely conceivable that a calculation can be made that would tell you if pays to spend money advertising and by how much - after all, in the site below, if they did nothing, no paid at all, it would take them an average of 54 visitors to get one Newsletter sign up.  On the other hand, when they run a Paid Search Campaign, one out of every 13 visitors from Paid Search Campaigns signs up for the Newsletter.

Ok, you don't spend the money and you get some sign-ups (saved money) but by not spending it - you left more money on the table that you could have made - so it's possible to calculate at what point a site starts to get meaningfully ahead.

I'm not a math wiz, but I see the need for a program like that - based on a site's analytics (perhaps it already exists, I bet it does and I just haven't come across it) but if it doesn't exist, someone should go and write that application.

But the application should not be a fill in spreadsheet - rather, I'd like to see it based on a site's actual analytics - you'd almost have to have that or else you'd just be plugging in numbers to an online form and not really know for sure if you should spend more or not.

Ideally - I see such a calculation in Google AdWords Account Management and Microsoft AdCenter's account management - but it could also be part of Bid Management tools, providing the actual conversion and visitor data, from Organic, Paid and Other Sources are captured. 

I put a lot of thought into Paid Search superior to Organic for ROI - Traffik, hopefully a good read for you.