Effect of PPC Ads on Organic Traffic

Website owners who are already rank well for their keywords often wonder whether it is worthwhile to also bid on these same terms on Google Adwords, wondering are the visitors who are clicking on their PPC ads people who could have been captured via the organic search results. And so was the company just paying for visitors they could have had for “free” (not actually free, but already paid for, since they will have paid for SEO work in order to rank highly in the organic results).

Google have conducted some research themselves, in order to determine whether less people click on the organic search results for certain keywords when the Adwords are displayed, compared to when they are switched off. The results of the research was in fact that Adwords increased the overall number of clicks the websites received by almost 90%, so the people who clicked the paid ads were different people from those who clicked the organics search results.

The question on everyone’s lips is, of course, can you trust research done by Google on their own product, the results of which prove that you should continue to use their product, Adwords, and pay for it, even when you already rank highly in the organic results? Well for one thing, Google has been very open about the fact that this is their own research. Secondly, the results of their research are clear and quantifiable and support their findings.

You can read Google’s research paper on Incremental Clicks Impact Of Search Advertising for further information.