The first person who responded to my free Google AdWords coupon post stated that they are currently ranking well but if their rankings ever drop then they can use the $100 AdWords coupon.

Why would anyone want to wait to collect free market research data? If you don't participate then you don't know if you are missing out on profits.

The longer you wait the more competitive the marketplace gets. The sooner you test the quicker you may be able to create another profit stream.

[added: they replied that they were near full capacity. when that problem occurs it is sometimes a sign to start charging more :) ]

More market research data from SES:

Keyword Discovery - has a free trial and paid subscription service.
New SERP EyeTracking Study. I believe Gord Hotchkiss also stated that in most engines 70% of traffic goes to organic listings and 30% goes to paid listings. In Google he said the split is closer to 85 / 15.
Shop.org research showed an average online retail conversion rate of 1.8%
Eric Ward offers link strategy consultations
Performics 2004 PPC Click Through Rate data:
- #1 ~ 3.5%
- #2 to #4 ~ 1.5%
- #5 on down ~ 0.75%
HitWise "bath tub" searches
- Google 48%
- Yahoo! 34%
- MSN 11%
HitWise userbase skew
- Google - male, higher income
- Yahoo! - younger, lower income
- MSN - female, older
HitWise share of US search market
- Google 55.5% (grew 24% in 2004)
- Yahoo! 31%
- MSN 7% (grew 10% in last year. grew 13% in last 4 months)
- Ask Jeeves 4%
Nielson Netratings January 05 share of search market stats (excluding searches which lead to internal pages)
- Google 47%
- Yahoo! 21%
- MSN 13%
- AOL 5%
- other 14%
- Google has 29.7 million searchers which only use Google
- Yahoo! has 13.7 million searchers which only use Yahoo!
- MSN has 12.2 million searchers which only use MSN
- G + Y overlap 18.3 million
- G + M overlap 13.2 million
- Y + M overlap 5.1 million
- 9.7 million use all three
- 3% of searches are local, though Google says more people use local search than Froogle
JupiterResearch
- domestic average CPC to go from 36 cents in 2004 to 40 cents in 2005 up to 47 cents by 2009
- domestic paid search expected to grow about 600 million a year from now to the end of the decade (from 3.2 billion this year to 5.5 billion in 2009)
- local search is expected to grow slower than other forms of search marketing