Magic UVs - PPC landing pages delivering organic traffic by magic...

[RobPell]

I have checked and double checked this.

GA is showing over the last couple of weeks mysite.com/ppc/landingpage1 as a landing page for organic traffic, where it shouldn't.

Main facts:

• The entire /ppc/ folder is blocked from the googlebot, and doesn't appear on any internal site maps. As far as I can tell, these pages have never been cached for the main index.
• I cannot recreate any of the organic searches myself (i.e. typing in keywords that triggered the traffic, even the almost unique long-tail ones). We just don't appear in the organic listings with these pages.
• The analytics and adwords accounts are linked. We are not paying for this mystery traffic through our PPC - these keywords are not appearing in our AdWords account (though other keywords / traffic are).
• The traffic is real - we have received phone calls from these pages, tracked to the visits recorded as organic

These pages should only receive PPC traffic. They are receiving organic traffic also, but I can't recreate it. Can anyone suggest what's going on? I'm concerned about duplicate content issues and also skewing the analysis of the PPC campaign.

Thanks

[mikecp]

I must admit, this one has me stumped. It sounds like there's some sort of tracking issue going on, but who knows.

Did you ever get this figured out?

[MicahMMG]

I realize you're probably not going to like this response, but, I would recommend not having separate landing pages for PPC.  Here's a few reasons why:

1.  You don't need it.  You can analyze how organic traffic with the exact same keywords performs against PPC traffic on the same page.

2.  You're now testing/optimizing 2 sites instead of 1.

3. It causes wary users to trust you less when they realize they're landing on different pages of your site when in each case, they've come from Google.

4. There's evidence that having your organic result and your PPC result go to the same page actually increases conversions, although it is hotly debated.

5. You're going to deal with a lot of duplicate content issues.

Edit: to answer your actual question, are you blocking organic traffic from those PPC pages via robots.txt?  Robots.txt only blocks crawling of the content on the page, not the URL itself, so if your PPC page has a keyword rich URL, organic users are still going to find it.

[CPLDistribution]

A couple of thoughts:

Is this organic traffic definitely from Google, not from another search engine that you may may not have blocked?

Alternatively, could there be a problem with the tracking parameters getting stripped out of the URLs?