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It's Monday morning here and I feel like crap. No I don't feel like crap because it's Monday morning, I feel like crap because it was very hot here yesterday and this little dumb bunny didn't drink enough water so by dinner time last night I was suffering from heat stroke.

Even then, when I had a fair idea of why I was feeling so lousy, I didn't drink enough water but went to bed instead. So today I'm still feeling like six week old dog poo ... but at least I'm now drinking plenty of water and I've drunk about 2 litres in the last two hours.

I guess my problems are fairly irrelevant to anyone living in most places in the United States right now but maybe you can keep it in mind for next summer so that you don't end up feeling the way I do. I guess the thing that annoys me the most about being affected by the heat is that it makes thinking difficult ... it's like thinking through a fog and that's just plain annoying.

It's especially annoying when you're trying to look at some fairly simple statistics as I am right now. You see Hitwise have just announced the launch of a new tool that compares the amount of traffic that flows to sites from organic and paid search engine listings and to show how important this tool is they've also released some statistics that shows how important a tool like this can be.

While this tool is obviously aimed squarely at mainstream industries it's still important to have a look at the figures because now we have something concrete when it comes to paid or organic listings and we don't just have to rely on our gut feelings.

I don't know about you but I've always felt that organic listings were perhaps far more important than paid listings when it comes to attracting traffic to our sites. I've always thought that being in the top two or three listings on one of Google's search engine results pages would bring far more traffic than purchasing the top one or two Adsense listings on the same page.

My view was further reinforced by several guys I know in the industry who have the top organic spot nailed down for some of the most important adult keywords and keyword phrases and they're making bucket-loads of money almost every day. On the other hand though I know of several affiliate marketers in this industry who wouldn't waste their time on organic listings at all; instead they're happy to pay whatever it takes to get those top one or two Adsense listings and they too make plenty of money.

As I said earlier we're unlikely to every get a tool like this one from Hitwise to enable us to compare paid and organic listings for adult terms but we can still use the figures Hitwise provides as an indicator of what the situation might be in this industry.

At the very top of the statistics provided by Hitwise is the office supply category and here we see that 51% of traffic to office suppliers comes from paid listings and in the apparel and accessories category 50.8% of traffic comes from paid listings.

Now on those figures you might think that paid listings have definitely got the edge over organic listings but things aren't that cut and dried. In appliances and electronics only 39.2% of traffic comes from paid listings and when you get down to flowers and gifts over 74% of traffic comes from organic listings.

Health and beauty and house and garden categories were also getting way more than half of their traffic from organic listings and embedded in those categories that do best from organic listings might be the clue to why organic is so important to them.

Who shops online for office supplies? Who shops online for flowers and gifts, health and beauty and house and garden products? And what do they expect to see at the other end of a link in the organic or paid listings?

I would suggest that businesses shop for office supplies and they might have a more positive view of what they might find at the other end of the link in a paid listing. On the other hand normal people - perhaps less Net savvy people - shop for those other items that attract more traffic from organic listings and they might be a little wary of what they might find at the other end of a paid listing.

Of course apparel and accessories doesn't help my argument much but then, as I said earlier, I'm thinking through a rather thick fog this morning so maybe there is something there that I'm missing.

Whether I'm right or wrong at least we now have some more solid figures to go on and that may help you formulate your search engine strategies for the future.