Brand traffic moved from organic to PPC - could it affect rankings?

[Inevo]

Hi,

We've just increased a lot of branded PPC clicks for one of our clients. I've worked out that roughly 5000 clicks per month has been moved from organic search to PPC (all brand related search queries).

These clicks are very cheap, but the client has expressed worries about what these clicks could do to our organic rankings.

Lots of brand search in organic results proves to Google that this is a strong brand, right? So what happens when all the searches are still there, but the organic listings stop getting the clicks? Could this have a ring effect on other non-brand rankings?

[Inevo]

Thank you guys! This was just what I needed.

Extra thumbs up for your article Amelia!

[CommT]

Hi,

This may prove interesting reading : http://searchengineland.com/google-research-even-if-you-rank-1-organically-you-can-double-your-clicks-with-paid-search-116713

All the best,

Amelia

[Ray-pp]

PPC and Organic tend to work together. In Adwords you can see the click through rates and numbers when a term is in both the organic and paid section. Try and figure out how many additional clicks you're getting because you're now doing a branded campaign.

You may be getting a better CTR and/or increased organic traffic simply because you have two campaigns targeting the brand term now (organic and search). If so, then the worry you have would be false, since the engagement has increased overall.

To answer directly, I would not be concerned that your organic rankings are affected because some clicks moved to the paid channel. However, if you identify a lot of cannibalization, maybe you want to stop the paid campaigns simply because you're paying for the traffic instead of getting it for free. But, cannibalization doesn't happen too often (as mentioned, the campaigns more often than not work together).