Will pausing my AdWords PPC campaigns impact my organic rankings?
-
Over 95% of my revenue comes from organic search; less than 5% comes from AdWords PPC (all other sources account for about 1-2%).
My ROI on AdWords is roughly zero. It's negative if you include opportunity costs.
My question is: if I pause all of my AdWords campaigns, is there ANY chance that my organic rankings (and organic click-through rates) will suffer?
This is really two questions. First, could Google retaliate to my reduced ad spending by dropping my rankings? Second, will searchers think differently about my organic link if they don't also see the accompanying paid link on the SERP?
-
Hi Jono,
Yes, you have to check into Google Analytics for this. You can also try to change the model attribution of the conversion to see what's the part of the Adwords Ads into the process.
Regards,
Jonathan
-
I would be interested to see where in the conversion funnel the Adwords campaign targets as compared to the organic searches, before making a decision to shut down the Adwords campaign.
As an example, I've had clients who shut down or paused ad campaigns and saw a dip in their organic revenue, primarily because their customers were maybe hitting the ads at the start of the research process. By the time they were ready to make the order they came in organically. Multi-channel funnels in Analytics can provide some insight there.
-
Thanks for all of the responses - this forum is a great resource!
-
Hi Akira
PPC and Organic position in the SERPs are not related. But you should continue to use PPC. SEO and PPC are complementary. Using the two increase your visibility.
In the SERPs the CTR is about 20% for the ads and 80% for the organic results. But the most people, companies, use 80% of their budget for the ads and only 20% for their content. You see where is the problem???
Regards,
Jonathan
-
About the PPC:
There is psychological effect on being on both PPC and top organic ranking. Also, on searches for terms with high intention of purchase, PPC has significant more clicks than organic positions. Google is displaying more PPC now than ever so most people won´t just scroll down to see the organic results.
You should consider this before you really turn off the PPC. If you already did this, then good luck and congratulations for your results.
-
Akira, there really is no direct connection between AdWords and organic rankings. However, there have been studies that show that if you show up in AdWords and in organic search for a search query it will benefit your organic--the visitors will tend to click on your organic listings and on the PPC ads.
Organic is not affected by PPC.
You may be able to pause the low-converting ads while still keeping the higher-converting ones. Furthermore, there may be other keywords that you can bid on that you aren't showing up for. I would look at Google Search Console's Search Analytics report and look at the impressions for organic and see which keywords are getting impressions but not clicks. That may reveal some keywords that you may want to bid on.
All in all, though, if you want to totally pause your AdWords ads it won't affect your rankings.
-
Hi Akira,
I support EGOL on this one and would go further in saying that in my experience there has never been an association between organic rankings and Adwords. They operate on 2 very different systems and principles and you are not going to take a hit organically (algorithmically produced responses to search queries based on relevancy) due to a decrease in spending on PPC (basically an open house auction system where you receive placement for bids).
As EGOL mentioned, in several years I have never seen a drop in organic rankings on a mixed organic/PPC campaign if PPC funding has been cut off.
The one problem you might have is on the mobile side where PPC positioning is dominant and organic rankings may not cut it. Depends on if your target audience is mobile-oriented and whether that's where your returns are coming from. Even so, based on your numbers, my guess is this move will save you some money and not hurt you organically.
Cheers,
Rob
-
Over 95% of my revenue comes from organic search
Yay! Nice work! You are one of the few remaining businesses who are able to do this.
My ROI on AdWords is roughly zero.
Me too. I just did yet another experiment to convince myself that it is almost impossible for a small biz, a retail reseller, to make good money, even any money, using Adwords.
My question is: if I pause all of my AdWords campaigns, is there ANY chance that my organic rankings (and organic click-through rates) will suffer?
My opinion on this is "NO". I would turn them off with confidence. I think that you will still get some of the sales that are currently coming in through Adwords.
First, could Google retaliate to my reduced ad spending by dropping my rankings?
I don't think that they will do this. I don't think that Google is vindictive in this way. Several years ago we used to run Adwords quite a bit. We would turn the ads on and off for employee vacations, sick days, and when our retail stock was low. Organic rankings never changed a bit.
Second, will searchers think differently about my organic link if they don't also see the accompanying paid link on the SERP?
I doubt it. I think that lots of searchers skip over the ads. Any searcher who runs ad blockers probably skips over the ads while cursing. I think that dropping Adwords might increase the profit margin of your business because it was probably depressing the profit margin while you were paying for the ads.
I think you are a smart guy because you have done the math to figure this out. Most people who run Adwords are blissfully losing their shirts and pants.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
PPC sessions being counted as organic in GA
I am coming across a very frustrating phenomenon in one of my PPC campaign reporting. In short: I believe that GA is counting some of my PPC sessions as organic (not provided). Has anybody come across this before? I believe they are being counted as organic because of the following: the website is brand new and does not rank for anything but their branded terms the few keywords showing up in GA are the terms we target our PPC towards the amount of sessions of Paid Search (in channels) and AdWords sessions don't match up (The number of actual PPC clicks is substantially higher than the Paid Search sessions) PPC clicks and sessions don't even match up in the AdWords part of GA GWT shows 0% CTR for any non branded terms Tell me I am crazy, but I really don't think I am. I just don't have the hard evidence to back it up. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Paid Search Marketing | | Rebecca.Holloway0 -
Changing Domains - Will a 301 redirect be looked unfavourably for my Ads?
Hey All, So over the next few weeks we are switching over a clients domain to a new one. Each of the old pages on the old domain will have a 301 redirect to it's new contextual page (with the same content). My question is this, we currently have multiple PPC campaigns running for this client and the ads are pointed towards the old domain so the ads will redirect over to the new domain. My question is this, will Adwords look at this redirection unfavourably? If so, then I will have to duplicate each ad (100's of ads) with a new destination URL (since if I edit the current ads they will lose all past performance history). Obviously for branding I'm going to have to probably change the display URL eventually but for now I'm looking at the BIG issues that could occur. I would normally call Google and ask this question but I don't want them to flag anything in my account just in case this is looked unfavourably. Thanks! Jon
Paid Search Marketing | | EvansHunt0 -
PPC for Luxury Goods Website
Hi Mozzers, I am starting a PPC campaign for a website that sells high-end products. The search volume for the generics is very high but I think the conversion rate on those will be quite low given the price of the products. Does anyone have any experience in doing PPC for high-end retailers and what type of keyword I should be bidding on? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | KarlBantleman0 -
Is there any reason to add the word "buy" to our Adwords keywords?
Was having a discussion with someone so I am going to write this up as neutral as possible and let you guys decide. We have a large keyword list and they are all setup as phrase. Should we go back and add the word buy in front of all those keywords? Even though they are setup as phrase already. Example: "Widget" (as a phrase) Should we go back and add "Buy Widget" as a keyword?
Paid Search Marketing | | EcommerceSite0 -
Adwords Keyword Research - Simplifying Process
So far here's my algorithm: I will make an excel spreadsheet with all of our currently optimized keywords (about 300 I believe) I will grab all the keywords possible out of the adwords keyword tool I will merge the adwords keyword tool keywords with the 300 on the excel spreadsheet and erase the duplicates. I'll drop what's left over in exact match into a google adwords campaign I'll then use the + modifier with brand names and with two word keywords such as +brand +keywords +here Will this algorithm find all of the keywords, or am I missing something?
Paid Search Marketing | | BobGW0 -
Adwords Product Listing Ads & Google Analytics mis-reporting
I hope you're sitting comfortably, this could be a long one and loaded with questions! Cut to the chase: Why is traffic from google product ads showing as 'organic' traffic in GA? Here's the scenario: Google Shopping I have thousands of products in a feed to google shopping (froogle, google base, google merchant, whatever you like to call it, I'll settle for google shopping for the purpose of this question). The URLs of this feed is tagged with GA tracking data (notably utm_source=GoogleBase&utm_medium=Product-Search), I have also tagged this with internal tracking which comes through in the back-end to assign orders to that specific source. In this case 'GOOGLEBASE'. Adwords Product Listing Ads As you know, a new (ish) feature of adwords pulls in your products from google shopping so that you get a richer ad (image, title, price) and displays this in the 'advert section' of the SERP. Once setting up a few of these, I noticed I was getting a fair amount of traffic for these new ads, taking one example, which resided in a relatively specific ad group (advertising Aviation Snips). Naturally, I wanted to find out which keywords were driving that traffic in order to improve the ads, or kill them if they weren't working. What was interesting is that I can't find anything about that traffic anywhere in adwords or google analytics. 254 clicks to 'aviation snips' must show up somewhere in analytics, if not the keywords, then what about the product? Analytics is showing nothing like that quantity of visits to those product landing pages where you'd expect. It's like ghost traffic. Google Analytics Since experimenting with product listing ads the organic traffic in GA has suddenly shot up, looking at the new keywords they are all queries which when I test them show up product listing ads in the SERP so it's obviously the paid listing ads driving this traffic. Why is google reporting these as organic, rather than paid? I also noticed a keyword appear as * in the PAID segment of analytics. I thought this was my missing aviation snips traffic, but digging into the landing pages for the * keyword, they are many different ones. There's a connection between the * and product listing ads, but what is it? Is the traffic being doubly reported? Back End Meanwhile we've seen an increase for orders tagged in the back-end of GOOGLEBASE which makes sense - google are pulling in my google shopping feed into the paid part of the SERPs and these are generating sales. Here are some of my initial thoughts / theories: 1. When google pulls in google shopping results into the organic part of the SERP, these get reported as ORGANIC in google analytics, even if you've tagged them otherwise. It seems they strip the tags out. This makes it very difficult to know if your google shopping feed is working well, or if you are doing well on standard organic traffic. 2. Google isn't separating out traffic as PAID with their new product listing ads, completely skewing the reports. It makes it look like you've gained great natural organic listings when if fact you are paying. 3. With relation to the missing Aviation Snips data - maybe google is showing a huge variety of products for that adgroup (even though it's specific) and therefore I can't see the traffic to the specific products that you'd expect. This I'm most confused about and wondered if I've missed a trick in setting the product listing ads up? I've attached a couple of screenshots which I hope will help clarify some of this. I can see product listing ads being great if you could get proper data to analyse and improve them. So here are my questions again if anyone can help? How do I see which keywords are driving the product listing ads? How do I see the landing pages for the product listings ads? What is the * keyword coming through in GA? How can you get GA to report product listing ads as paid rather than organic? Thank you so much. If I can gather enough data on this all and work it out I'll try to write up in a blog post to help others. 0rOMM.png GUAE0.png fWPL7.png
Paid Search Marketing | | ewanr0 -
PPC ad guidelines?
I learned Google PPC years ago and got certified by Google. Back then and for a long time since I know it was best practice to capitalize words in your domain name. I know Google no longer does this and that words in your domain name of your ad are now all lowercase. I hear recommendations and see them practice that adding keywords in a directory are a good way to still get capitalized words in your ad. When I learned PPC, I was told your display URL and your destination URL had to match. Now I'm seeing ads where that is not the case. If I have an ad that takes someone to my homepage of a coupon site, can I have a display URL that says: mysite.com/Coupons Even if the destination URL is just mysite.com ? I'm seeing conflicting things online and it's hard because I don't know what the current guidelines are after this change.
Paid Search Marketing | | DanDeceuster0