Getting penalized for cutting my budget!

organic, adwords, adwords budget, organic ranking

[skatingtoolman]

Everything was fine, our sales were growing every month for the past 2 years, then we decided to cut our Adwords budget by about 50%. We were told by an Adwords consultant that we were throwing our money at Google without any real direction. We did not have conversion tracking in place the correct way. Sure, he said, you are getting click, but I don't feel as though you are getting direct sales from your ads.
So, we cut back our budget so that we could re-vamp our ad campaigns, using a different ad for every single keyword, up to 15,000 to be exact. This was at the end of May 2011. Sure, we are spending a fraction of what we were on Adwords, now the ads are very specific, but our sales are down by 35%. I asked whether or not Google penalized our organic rankings due to our cut in our Adwords budget, but our consultant assured us that this was not the case. The only change I am aware of, is that we installed an auto meta-info module that would automatically add meta info for all of our products.
Just wanted to put this out there. Has anyone had any experience with this happening?

[smallcompany]

We did not have conversion tracking in place the correct way.

Even if you have it now, how do you compare the sources of your sales that were happening in the past with those that happen today?

but I don't feel as though you are getting direct sales from your ads

Feel tracking or how is that called? Was there anything to back that claim except your belief into it?

In short, I don't see you can complain about something you did know how it worked at the first place.
There are tens of reasons why your sales could be down now. One of them could easily be the cut in AdWords spend which caused your traffic to go down.

Do you have the right traffic and conversion tracking in place now?

[skatingtoolman]

Yes, we now have the correct conversion tracking in place now.
100% of our sales are via on-line. Clicks don't equal sales. Now we can track these clicks to sales due to the conversion tracker. In the past, we spent lots of money for clicks. Some of these resulted in sales, others resulted in maybe a bookmark to be purchased later. We were getting about 12,000 clicks per month prior to cutting our budget back to about 4,000 clicks per month. Unfortunately, we did not have our conversion tracking in place during the 12,000 per click time-period. I have noticed that many of our organic rankings have slipped since cutting our Adwords budget. My question is: "Does Google penalize your organic results due to a significant cut in budget?"

[buckworks]

Does Google penalize your organic results due to a significant cut in budget?

No.

Whatever else is going on, that's not part of the mix.