Correlation between Google Organic & AdWords Traffic Drops?

[jebernier]

I was under the understanding that there is no correlation between Google Organic & AdWords but, recently I have been noticing a disturbing trend for one of my websites impacted by Google Panda 4.1.

It seems that whenever my Google Organic traffic drops I see a corresponding drop in my AdWords Campaign for the same website. I have been tracking this for weeks and it seems that when Google Organic traffic increases, Google AdWords traffic increases. When Google Organic traffic drops, Google AdWords traffic drops.

Has anyone else seen this?

John

[goodroi]

There are some legitimate reasons you can be seeing this.

#1 - If your industry is seasonal. Let's say you have a winter supply website. Your organic & paid will rise and drop depending on the season.

#2 - There has been some research done that shows top organic rankings combined with adwords leads to an synergistic increase in clicks. If you decrease your adwords you decrease your monopoly and allow the competition to organically appear above the fold giving consumers an option that isn't you which drops your organic clicks.

#3 - You are writing the anchor text for your organic & paid listings. Some people are great at crafting relevant and timely ad copy/title tags and other people aren't. This can impact your traffic.

#4 - Your competition can be causing this. If your competition takes out a big adword campaign they will rank above your adwords (so fewer ppc clicks for you) and they will also push your organic listing below the fold (fewer organic clicks). Even if they competition isn't outspending you, their ad copy could be causing issues. If they start advertising a "free giveaway" that will steal a bunch of traffic. If they change the ad copy to make it relevant to the latest news headlines that can also siphon away a good amount of traffic from your ppc & organic.


It is possible to see correlation but that doesn't mean causation.

[Robert Charlton]

It is possible to see correlation but that doesn't mean causation.

To add a possible #5 to the list... I have seen situations where search volume is tightly tied to time of day, so both AdWords and organic could well rise and fall together... but because of search frequency, not because of organic affecting AdWords, or vice versa.

[Martin Ice Web]

jebernier,, i can confirm this and from all natural pattern you would expect Adwords traffic to be stable. But it isnīt.
I see thi spattern in Shopping ads more clearly.
I think they use your adswords/Shopping data for ranking purposes and look what is popular today. Amazon knows why they donīt share this data to Google.

[vladowsky]

It would be foulish from them not to use all big data from all of their products

[jebernier]

Thanks everyone.
Martin
"I think they use your adswords/Shopping data for ranking purposes and look what is popular today."

That's what I've been wondering, is Google using my AdWords data to adjust my Organic rankings?