Adword Click Thru count vs. my Stats

[clarksc3]

I track like most people the unique visitors I get a day. It is pretty consistant. Example below:

Natural
Mon: 4900
Tue: 5100
Wed: 4500
Thu: 3800
Fri: 3000

When I purchase Adwords, I subtract what google says is my Click Thrus for the day so I can see what my Natural traffic is. And here is what my real traffic looks like.

My Stats -Adwords =Natural Traffic

Mon: 9100 .. 6000 .. 3100
Tue: 9800 .. 6200 .. 3600
Wed: 8800 .. 5800 .. 3000
Thu: 7500 .. 5000 .. 2500
Fri: 6200 .. 4500 .. 1700

As you can see it looks like my natural traffic went way down. When I stop advertising it goes back to normal. I have seen this for 5 months atleast.

Is Google Adsense over counting the click thru or is my SE rankings going down when I use Adwords. OR are people preferring The paid Adwords (right side) over my seach engine listings?

Thanks
Clark

[hobbnet]

I highly doubt adwords is affecting your Search Engine ranking. It has been said by GG and others that adwords and natural listings are unaffected by each other.

I think you might be on the right track with this:

are people preferring The paid Adwords (right side) over my seach engine listings?

I don't think they prefer them but since people are clicking on the ad, that means they aren't clicking on any of the other listings (you can't click twice in one pageview)

Since your overall traffic has raised I would say you are in a good position. But, only if your adwords campaign is profitable.

[Mardi_Gras]

>I track like most people the unique visitors I get a day

Unless you are using cookies to track uniques, your figures are probably way over-inflated. See:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[SlyOldDog]

Not only does the adwords already look like it's taking traffic from your natural listings, but you'll find if you track the adwords clickthroughs in your stats that Google often doesn't count people who double click an ad.

This means the people coming from adwords is most likely even higher than the figure Google states.

That means your natural clicks must already be negative :)

I'm trying to get my head around what a negative click might be ;)