Paid search impact on Organic Search traffic - Is it in the positive side or negative side?

[gmk1567]

Recently came across an article stating that Paid search may affect traffic through Organic search.

Did anyone have similar experience?

[john4math]

People will see your ads, and then go to your site, or search for it to find more information.  In Adwords, for display campaigns, Google will show you "view-through conversions", which occur when someone sees your ad and didn't click it, but went to your site and converted.  This happens (at least for us) more often that I would have expected.  For some of our campaigns, almost 1/3 of our conversions are view-through conversions.  Google doesn't track this for search ads, but yes, just having your name out there on ads will get people to look at your site, or remember it and search for it later.

It's not getting a boost from the search engine just because you buy their ads... it's because people will remember seeing your ads and then go and search for your site.

[reilly3000]

John is spot on. The other factor to consider is personalization. When people are in a research mode and visit your site via paid search, they are more likely to have a personalized organic result for your site since they've already visited it. On long sales cycle transactions, this can be a very significant factor!