Sales Tanked since going organic vs adwords

Please HELP

[johnnydash]

I am part of a very nice family business. We sell via the internet and have always used Google Adwords. About a year and a half ago, my brother figured out how to get our website postioned really well organically. Typically, we rank right underneath the manufacturers of the products that we sell, but their websites are just informational, so we have the first position from a selling point. Our goal was to get away from the Adwords and go straight organic, which is what we did last week, and sales decreased by 75%. The crazy thing is that the traffic is exactly the same to the website. We use statcounter and google analytics. How is this possible?

[jwolthuis]

>> my brother figured out how to get our website postioned really well organically.

Please share your formula. Quid Pro Quo.

>> which is what we did last week, and sales decreased by 75%.

Our sales also decreased by 75% last week, and we made no changes to our AdWords budget.

I'm guessing it has something to do with the warm weather which has finally reached much of the country. Less people shopping via the Internet.

[dpd1]

Yeah, I think one week leaves room for it to be a fluke. But did you just shut down AW 100%? Might have been good to do it little by little.

[jecasc]

The amount of traffic you receive from adwords or search results is not important.

What is important is the conversions you got from adwords or the search results.

Adwords usually have a much higher conversion rate than the normal search results. It is very well possible that you get 5 sales out of 100 visitors with adwords, and only 1 sale out of 100 visitors that come through your normal search results.

It is also possible that returning customer where returning through your adwords ad and could not find you anymore.

Also if you have activated broad match in your Adwords account your adwords might be shown for keyword combinations where you don't rank at all or do not rank as good as you thought.

And don't forget - with turning of Adwords you have just reduced your exposure on the first site of the search results by 50%.

[lorax]

I'd question the value of the keywords you earned rank for. Are they the same as the one's you used for your PPC? Have you compared the conversion rates on the keywords you used for PPC versus the keywords you rank well for organically? There are many different factors in play here.

[Planet13]

Is the traffic coming from the same countries? Or is it being replaced by traffic from other countries?

Is the traffic coming to your store at the same time frame as before? Or is it all coming at 3:00 in the morning now?

I would also just chime in that even if you do get high rankings, if your name is not well known, having an adwords display on the same page as your organic listings can help people feel more confident about your site and, thus, more likely to click on your organic listing.

This might not be what you are asking but I hope it helps.

[edited by: Planet13 at 8:05 pm (utc) on Jun 15, 2011]

[Planet13]

Typically, we rank right underneath the manufacturers of the products that we sell, but their websites are just informational, so we have the first position from a selling point.

Please share your formula. Quid Pro Quo.

for the original poster, getting a link from the Manufacturer's website would be gold.