The impact of Adwords changes on organic traffic

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In 2016, Google brought, one by one, changes to the way paid results are displayed on search pages: February 2016: give up the ads on the right and only those above and below the organic results remain April 2016: change the color of the announcement markers from yellow to green May 2016: ad title increases from 25 to 30 characters, initial tests show 25% increase in click-through rate Obviously, all these changes were made to maximize the visibility of Adwords ads and maximize the company's revenues. But when the click rate increased on the ads, it obviously decreased elsewhere, namely on the organic results. So, we have a situation where AdWords ads compete more strongly with organic results, even getting to attract clicks that in the past were for organic results. Although this is obvious, we wanted to find out what the actual impact was in percentages.



Work methodology To determine this, we relied on the data we collected monthly from Search Console and on 4 representative sites. In order to have the best possible image, the chosen sites had the following characteristics: Data collected for at least 12 months ; The sites have a clear, unique brand (to correctly identify brand searches); The sites have no problems in terms of Phone Number Data organic performance, which means that there were no significant decreases on the monitored keywords (minimum 50) and their average was continuously increasing. In order to be able to make an adequate comparison, we only relied on annual organic growth percentages and click-through rate (CTR) in order not to be influenced by the particularities of traffic volumes.



The obtained data look like this: The evolution of the click rate for brand words July 2015-July 2016 CTR evolution for brand terms Brand terms are those keyword sequences that contain the client's brand (EX: Netlogiq SEO or Netlogiq ). These searches are made by users who are familiar with the brand and explicitly want to reach the brand's website. For this type of terms, the average decrease was -15.31%. The evolution of the click rate for non-brand words July 2015-July 2016 CTR evolution for generic terms Generic terms are words that do not contain a site brand (EX: SEO, online marketing ). These searches are performed by users who want a specific product or service and do not have an explicit preference for one brand or another. For this type of terms, the decrease was -6%. Data analysis Although a decrease was expected, the biggest surprise was given by the decrease and the significantly larger decrease for brand words.