Shutting down Adwords bumps sales

[fabulousyarn]

There is something I have noticed happenning over the past several months - and I'm started to think its not an anomaly.

I have been testing the waters as to the effect of pulling out of adwords. I was shut down (erroneously, google tells me) for about 3 weeks, and noticed that my sales seemed to not be really greatly affected. More variation day to day, but not on the whole much different overall. I rank very well for almost all my long tail keywords (the ones I know about, anyhow). So, holding my breath, I have been shutting down adwords once in a while. Almost invariably, immediately (within a couple of hours) after but all the campaigns on hold - I get a bump in transactions. This has happenned now 5 or 6 times - has anyone else ever noticed anything like this? Just wondering. I am a product site, not an adsense site, fyi.

[tedster]

Wow, five or six times certainly does sound like a pattern - but what a strange one.

Does your analytics let you see how the buyers are finding your site? In other words, is this an increase in organic search traffic every time you pause your Adwords? And if so, can you track back to any ranking changes that parallel your Adwords pause? Or perhaps there is something more complex going on that creates a correlation that is not cause-and-affect?

[buckworks]

an increase in organic search traffic every time you pause your Adwords

That is definitely a possibility if some of your paid ads were appearing on terms where you already had strong organic listings.

If the organic listings had more informative descriptions than the paid ads, which could easily happen simply because there's room for more verbiage, perhaps they're attracting better targeted visitors?

Just thinking out loud here ...

If you have some searches where your paid ads are in competition with your organic listings, consider experimenting with position preferences for those ads so they'll [usually] appear lower than the organic listings.

[fabulousyarn]

Hey Buckworks - thats a good thought, stop competing with myself, for instance. And yes, tedster, at least 5 or 6 times, though I might not be counting times I ignored it out of habit! :)

It doesnt look like an increase in organics per se, but I'll take a look - and I don't seem any rankings changes that correlate, but as I said, its only just now that I'm taking it seriously.

But it seems to be an increase in SALES, not necessarily traffic, but I am going to dig into the numbers - and see if I can see anything. With mayday kicking my butt, its hard to see anything else but the tremendous dump in overall conversions.

Judy

[outland88]

I’ve always said it is good to pause Adwords intermittently but for differing reasons. What you’re likely experiencing though is the honeymoon period when you drop the keywords or pause the account and there is no noticeable falloff in sales and sometimes bumps for 6-8 weeks. If you’re really good at marketing that honeymoon can be much longer. “Got Milk”

Google made vague references quite a while back that they weren’t going to let the ads for the domain and the site both appear on the front page. At that time it was not uncommon for a mother site and five of its affiliates to occupy all of the ad slots on the first page plus rank highly in the natural results. That though is not chiseled in granite. In other words now be careful about competing against good natural results you may already have.

Also if you’ve paused the whole account check to see if the IP the bot is crawling from has changed. See if you get a bump up in the natural results for particular keywords.

[fabulousyarn]

Wow. Thank you outland99 - this is incredibly spot-on. I don't quite understand what you mean by 'ads for the domain' and 'ads for the site' - I don't advertise anything else on any other related domain or subdomain. But I def. may be competing against my own good results - tho when I check - my results appear right there along with my ads.....and I will also check the positioning of the keywords, in particular. Currently I'm aiming at targeting words/phrases I do not particularly rank for - but I do test both.

[tedster]

It's definitely an area worth testing. Some sites have seen a strong synergy between Adwords and organic rankings. When both are present. the total sales and traffic can be MORE than the sum of the two, each on their own. This synergy seems to kick in when the site is well branded and bidding on its own brand name, but some have noticed it in other situations, too.

Other testers see something like traffic cannibalism, or competing with yourself - although your numbers are the most extreme report I've heard in that direction.

[outland88]

Some sites have seen a strong synergy between Adwords and organic rankings. When both are present. the total sales and traffic can be MORE than the sum of the two, each on their own. This synergy seems to kick in when the site is well branded and bidding on its own brand name, but some have noticed it in other situations, too.

Other testers see something like traffic cannibalism

Absolutely. You're more familar with Adwords than you let on.

And the testing is not without hazards or drops in rankings.

tho when I check - my results appear right there along with my ads

Then I wouldn't think about it if it's doing what you want.

[fabulousyarn]

Day 2 of no adwords except for 2 campaigns for non-ranking keywords and my sales are sky high.

Outland - still wondering what you mean by this :I don't quite understand what you mean by 'ads for the domain' and 'ads for the site'"

tedster - I'm going to see if there is any pattern with my being there in the rankings (top 5) and in the adwords, or if it seems, as it does now, that cannibilizing is the rigt word.

Of course, I could just have a really savvy customer base and/or really terrible ads, but I don't think so.

Have a great weekend everyone and thank you for the fabulous commentary - its really got me digging - J

[outland88]

Likely what you mentioning now has nothing to do with Adwords. It just sounds like you are selling well for now. Any test I would be looking for would involve more than a few days and involve pausing substantial portions of a campaign to draw conclusions.

'ads for the domain' and 'ads for the site'"

I didn't say that but it could have been interpeted that way. I said ads and the site. The ads would be to the right and the site in the natural results. Google at one time loosely implied they weren't going to let both appear on the first page. The implication was it was somewhat spammy. On the other hand that doesn't seem to be chiseled in granite.

[fabulousyarn]

Ok, gotcha - didnt understand the terms - you meant ads for the domain and results for the site. Got it.

I've paused all but two of the campaigns. Of course, I am reading that the serps are radically re-adjusting back to normal, but I"m not holding my breath. Im just going to keep testing and watching.

j

[chewy]

OP,

Please keep us posted on this. Especially in light of the new Google Instant product.

Tedster,

Is there a place where this synergy is actually documented - maybe a case study? I've always heard of such a synergy and it would be good if you could cite a reference if there were one available.

[tedster]

I've seen several such studies - and as I mentioned, the effect seems to be market or keyword specific rather than universal. The only way you know whether you will see it or not is test it for yourself. I will check for a case study reference or two. I know they are around.

[tedster]

Here's an interesting article from Stephan Spencer on the topic Organic Search & Paid Search: Are They Synergistic Or Cannibalistic? [searchengineland.com]

As he mentions, he was one of the people who discovered the synergy site early on an invariably recommended it. In this article, he changed his tune a bit. And it's interesting because the case study he charts matches this thread's topic: dropping Adwords actually improved sales.

[karter]

I read this whole thread and saw no mention of previous adwords to sales conversion rate.

To me it sound more like your adwords campaign was yielding zero return before and after you switched it off, ergo switching it off has very little impact on sales

Then again, i am just guessing

[chewy]

Saw the Spencer article earlier today and I do not see enough rigor in this "experiment" to draw any real conclusions.

If it was a branded term type campaign, these specific findings might make perfect sense - still, I do not think the time period is sufficient to get particularly excited about these findings.

Anybody read Spencer's book?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My take: It sounds highly improbable that you get more sales when you don't advertise. An ad, no matter how insignificant, can only raise the chance of attracting a customer so getting rid of them, in theory, can't attract more customers.

Reality: The ad agency is also the search company. They aren't going to want people clicking on your #1 ranked keyword for free when your paid link can be clicked on for profit.

That gray area: when you rule out the impossible whatever is left is left, no matter how improbable, contains the truth. You're seeing it happen repeatedly that canceling campaigns results in more sales so if it's not pure luck Google is indeed manipulating rankings differently for each of paying and non paying links.

So is it pure luck? How could we devise a test for this? Obviously you can't post about such a test here....

[tedster]

Over the years many people have had theories about how Adwords and organic ranks might relate within Google -- Adwords will boost your organic rankings or Adwords will lower your rankings. Several tests have been reported on and no one has ever demonstrated a relationship between Google paid and Google organic.

As far as I'm concerned, Google says the two departments don't interact and that's the way it looks to me. It would KILL their business model if they were caught with their thumb on the scale in either direction. And people with major Adwords budgets and lots of data watch out for bias all the time.

So it doesn't matter what anyone thinks they would do in Google's position. Google doesn't play the game that way. They don;t need to and it would be stupid.

[chewy]

it also seems counter intuitive -

Why would Google boost your organic words in the serps when you turned AdWords off?

If they were truly evil, they would set this up to work in the opposite fashion.

Unless they are deliberately trying to confuse us!

More to the secondary point:

Does AdWords ads (ranking 1 - 4) plus organic results (ranking 1 - 4) on the same term yield a consistently better result (traffic and sales) than just one of the 2?

does this apply more to brand terms or widget / frozen widget type terms?

(seems like I'm proposing my own test!)

[Planet13]

Does AdWords ads (ranking 1 - 4) plus organic results (ranking 1 - 4) on the same term yield a consistently better result (traffic and sales) than just one of the 2?

There have been times when i saw an organic result that ranked high but the title or url looked like it might not be on topic for my search terms. Then I noticed they had an adword ad in the right column, and I decided that maybe their page was related after all, and I ended up clicking on the organic result.

However, my behavior is probably an exception, as most people probably wouldn't bother to see if they are the same sites or not (or would click the adword as).

[chewy]

The best of the best (many of whom happen to hang out here) know what the answer to this question is.

And,other than a red herring dangled here or there to throw others off the scent, I suspect they ain't talking.