PPC effects on Organic SERP

[Goetzman]

Whenever I lower my adwords PPC cost, my organic positioning seems to go down? Are they related, if so that seems pretty shallow.

Anyone else seeing this?

[wissamdandan]

Never saw or experienced before.

maybe its a coincidence,

try to do a test, run PPC for 3 months then stop it for three months. and compare

[flowsimple]

PPC and organic results do not affect each other. Period.

Your organic results are being affected by something else.

[Goetzman]

I hoped that would be the case, it was just odd that it both shifted at the exact same time.

[TellThemEverything]

There is just no way that Google could get away with this - a clear conflict of interest and they would be sued into bankruptcy. They keep these divisoins so seperate it's crazy - when we were talking to them recently about use of their adwords API they yet again confirmed that they have no knowledge of organic position or traffic..

[damionbrown]

I'd be interested in seeing your data on this if you'd care to fully share/blog etc?

[NickPateman81]

It's a coincidence Korgo. There are so many millions of people using Google that if it were true it would of been stastistically proven already.

To be honest, if they shifted "at the exact same time" then it's even more unlikely! Google doesn't make changes to rank instantly - if it did then we'd all be able to suss out metrics a lot faster.

[jcolman]

Do you know what kinds of keywords are leading to less organic traffic?  Are they keywords for your brand name or down in the Long Tail?

My guess is that your organic traffic is, in fact, going down, but not because your rank is going down.  Rather, it's because of multi-touch attribution.  If you're advertising less (esp. less in the Long Tail), then you'll receive less organic traffic for keyword searches involving your brand name.

This is because a new visitor will often vist your site more than once - the first time, they'll use a PPC click and the second time, they'lls earch on your brand name (because now they know it from the earlier PPC visit).  But if you reduce your PPC spend, then you can't get as much multi-session traffic.  Make sense?

There's a clear relationship here.  See this presentation on Slideshare for an example of how my company tested this relationship in a few different ways.  You'll see the kinds of results we ot and then can formulate your own tests.