Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Adwords start Organic traffic SIGNIFICANTLY drops
-
I hope someone can give me some insight here, or at least point me in the right direction.
As of September 1 we are running Adwords. We are seeing an alarming drop in our organic traffic since then. It's almost like Adwords is cannibalizing organic.
August/September
Paid 116/847
Organic 648/178
We've looked at why the Organic could have dropped (penalties, site function issues, etc.) and have found nothing unusual.
Can someone give me a reason why this might be happening, Why such a dramatic decrease just as adwords is started.
Thanks!
-
Yes. it's possible. I would look at their top pages from previous months and see if there's been a specific decline in traffic to those organically, then make sure that you aren't advertising on those pages. However - I would like to point out that it is bad news for them if their own ad can take away that much traffic. Someone else could advertise there and take away the same traffic.
Be sure it's not brand terms also. Double check negative keywords too.
-
Thank you both for the reply.
I've looked at Webmaster, nothing there in way of penalty. However there was a surge in indexed pages (like huge from 700 to 7,000) that happened in this same time period (aug-september) We discovered that the developers had implemented a search function on the site that was creating essentially duplicate content. We had them implement canonical on the site to avoid issues there. Personally this is what I believe has affected the organic more so than the adwords. But the client thinks that has not had an effect, he believes that organic traffic was erroneously reported in previous months. ( I believe this to be impossible, true?)
I'm trying to figure out if there is a remote possibility, that adwords would cannibalize organic. It seems counterintuitive to spend adwords money, but not increase traffic, just "steal" traffic from one source for another. But it also seems "reasonable" that Google would take a site out of organic results to force click thrus on the ad (too cynical....? perhaps...lol)
Seems there would be no advantage to running adwords if that is the case. I can get the relatively the same traffic for free, right?
Thanks for your thoughts on this.
-
Hi,
It is very possible that more people are clicking on your adwords ad, as mathamatix has said. Have you noticed a drop in organic positions? Also check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure there are no manual penalties that have coincided with this. It's unlikely, but always worth covering all bases.
Just looking at your numbers though, I would guess your adwords ad is taking away from organic.
-Andy
-
Maybe more people are clicking your ad than on your organic results. Where do you rank organically for your main keywords anyway?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Organic traffic down
My 15 or so clients have all seen a drop in organic traffic by about 20% on GA4 for April. Rankings have not dropped or anything like that - so just wondering if anyone else has had similar?
Reporting & Analytics | | Contentcoms2 -
Impressions clicks and traffic drop
Hello,
Reporting & Analytics | | SharonEKG
So something weird is going on, i run a few websites for clients, few different CMS. there has been a constant increase in traffic and ranking on one wordpress website and now the squarespace website is climbing up in rankings in the past few months. both has GTM installed for months, which has been optimized regularly.
for the wordpress website, in the past 2 weeks, starting June 4th, on google search console the clicks and impressions has started going down to the point that i lost 90% of clicks and impressions and traffic on analytics has started dropping a few days later, now at about 60% less traffic. for the Squarespace website, exactly the same thing, started June 7th and drop in clicks/impressions (though ranking increase) and then traffic drop. checked both GTM for recent changes incase of wrong code implement, no changes, no new major issues.
different hostings different CMS, no link between them. i just cant put my finger what is going on. anyone got any idea what is going on?0 -
Any solution to low search traffic on weekend
Hi. all, https://www.babyment.com is content website. our search traffic always shows a dip on weekend (friday to sunday), anyone has idea why it is like this? and is there a solution to this? or this is a just normal? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | melvinwu0 -
Average Session duration has dropped on May 12th and not recovered
Hello, On May 12th my average session duration within Google Analytics went from 1.12 seconds to 10 seconds. Every month since then it has had an average session duration of around 10 seconds. My traffic over this time has increased. I am concerned that the website is being attacked by bots. What should I be looking out for to work out what is happening? Many thanks for your help.
Reporting & Analytics | | mblsolutions0 -
Referral Traffic vs. Campaign Traffic in Google Analytics
I have two sites: a blog and an ecommerce site. The blog funnels people to the ecommerce site. In Analytics I'm seeing declines in referral traffic from the blog to the ecommerce site. During the same time I'm seeing an increase in campaign traffic to the ecommerce site, with most campaign traffic coming from the blog. I believe the increase in campaign traffic is largely a result of simply having installed more tracking links. This leads me to believe that the declines I'm seeing in referral traffic is simply a result of the increase in campaign traffic. In other words, what was once counted and reported as being referral traffic is now being counted and reported as campaign traffic. So my question is this: In Google Analytics is campaign traffic ALSO reported as referral traffic, or is campaign traffic reported separately and not duplicated in referral traffic reports? I'll provide a concrete example to make this more clear in case it isn't: Say site X sends 1000 visits each month to site Y. Say 50 of those visits come from a single link on X. If that link is changed so that campaign Z data info added (via the Google URL Builder), would you expect to then see 950 referral visits each month from site X to site Y plus 50 campaign visits to site Y via new campaign Z, or would you continue to see 1000 referral visits plus the new 50 campaign visits? Many thanks in advance to anyone that can shed some light on this.
Reporting & Analytics | | aaronprimal0 -
How can we view traffic from specific Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit accounts in Google Analytics?
Dear Moz Community, This is a Google Analytics question. Using Google Analytics, we're trying to identify trends of visitors on a website from specific social media accounts, i.e: twitter.com/account-x facebook.com/account-x youtube.com/account-x reddit.com/r/account-x Ideally, we would like to be able to see the success rate for specific posts on these social media accounts, and how users engaged on the website after arriving from clicking a link on one of these accounts. Is this drill-down feature currently possible in Google Analytics? Many thanks for helping!
Reporting & Analytics | | BoomDialogue690 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Senuke and traffic generator program is a good idea?? I think i got some problems now.
First of all thanks for reading, especially if you are the one whose bright ideas will help me out:) I started using senuke xcr about 3 months ago, obviously at the beginning i didnt make much success(not like I do now). Later i bought that inferno thingy and it actually works. First 2 weeks didnt make much difference(although i could see some little but stable uprising) but after 4th week ended, the average impression and queries doubled up, 6th went up again, its like every week or two it jumps up and keeps it there. Also the actual traffic from keywords went up! When about the second week finished, i started using a traffic generator program, first it leveled out the impressions and seemed to help a bit. Lately i think it messed it all up, plus about 2 weeks ago there was 2-3 dayswhen i sent a bit more traffic than usual and around that time the average rising of impressions didnt happened, it might even went down. Now i stopped using traffic g. and everything stayed the same no improvement!! Anyone could help me? I need to get it moving up again! Also im still nowhere near the top as the keywords are competitive well at least for me. What do i do wrong and what should i do? Also what about traffic generator? ps is it safe or/and or allowed to write that? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Sugafree0