Turns out... Adwords affects SEO!

[GetKash]

I don't know if this is a revelation for everyone or just me but... Adwords is affecting my impressions and ranking!

I started to run my Adwords campaigns every day apart from Saturday, and I started to see a crazy correlation. Every Saturday my Impressions, Clicks and Avg Pos will drop by at least 20% compared with the rest of the week!

Does anyone have any insight on this?

 

[Stavro]

Try switching your off-day to a weekday and see if the pattern holds.

Most of my sites have a similar weekend slump, with or without Adwords, simply because fewer people use the internet on weekends.

 

[Deleted member 15724]

My guess is you're losing impressions on brand related searches. Once you turn off those ads, there's less people are searching for your brand which is why you'll see that drop.

 

[SepticFish]

Might be unrelated. I always have worse impressions on Sundays

 

[KHer0]

If there is a relation, it wont we this obvious

Saturday always has droo in traffic for my sites too

 

[Zwielicht]

Saturday always has droo in traffic for my sites too

Same here. Every site I've ever managed has a dip on Saturdays.

 

[GetKash]

Try switching your off-day to a weekday and see if the pattern holds.

Most of my sites have a similar weekend slump, with or without Adwords, simply because fewer people use the internet on weekends.

Great shout, I'll give it a try on my most effective day and check back with results!

My guess is you're losing impressions on brand related searches. Once you turn off those ads, there's less people are searching for your brand which is why you'll see that drop.

That's a great point actually, I'll have a look tomorrow, could well be spot on. People aren't actively seeing our name around so it's not in peoples mind to search for it actively.

Same here. Every site I've ever managed has a dip on Saturdays.

Ahh okay maybe it's just a general traffic pattern - however, on this site it seems to have made a huge difference.

The quest continues.

 

[theRevolt]

I don't know if this is a revelation for everyone or just me but... Adwords is affecting my impressions and ranking!

I started to run my Adwords campaigns every day apart from Saturday, and I started to see a crazy correlation. Every Saturday my Impressions, Clicks and Avg Pos will drop by at least 20% compared with the rest of the week!

Does anyone have any insight on this?

Somehow you seem to be mixing up PPC and organic here.
Now you can easily check (if you have GA) for the past 30 days or YTF your traffic pattern and see if there are dips for other traffic sources.
For all B2B sites, you can see the pattern Mondy - Friday with a drop off on the weekend (as almost no one is in the office).

Simply look at IS lost (budget / rank) then you will see if
a) there is just less volume (no IS lost due to limited budget)
b) You lost IS due to adrank which could be your bid, QS etc.

That way you can drill down a little more on what caused this (there is more but that should get you started on the right track)

 

[andywang]

does your traffic normally drop on the weekends?

 

[Lightproxies]

Maybe the brands up their bidding on the weekend, which would cause you the dip - it can be related to the niche that you are in, but that's for you to find out I guess.
Some brands are just having too much money, they would even bid their own domain and appear #1 in the SERP, and #2 would also be their website, thus with people most prone to click on #1, they'd be paying every single cent and dollar for all searches which is really hefty imo.
Nevertheless, I find Sundays to be the least traffic - maybe it's most of everyone's day off and the Sunday traffic is just lousy imo.

 

[GetKash]

Somehow you seem to be mixing up PPC and organic here.
Now you can easily check (if you have GA) for the past 30 days or YTF your traffic pattern and see if there are dips for other traffic sources.
For all B2B sites, you can see the pattern Mondy - Friday with a drop off on the weekend (as almost no one is in the office).

Simply look at IS lost (budget / rank) then you will see if
a) there is just less volume (no IS lost due to limited budget)
b) You lost IS due to adrank which could be your bid, QS etc.

That way you can drill down a little more on what caused this (there is more but that should get you started on the right track)

This report is filtered for Organic Traffic, so we are looking at Organic Traffic through the week and seeing a correlation on the Saturday where Organic Traffic drops

 

[theRevolt]

This report is filtered for Organic Traffic, so we are looking at Organic Traffic through the week and seeing a correlation on the Saturday where Organic Traffic drops

Ok, what products are you promoting , who is your target audience?
Either way, I just looked at a few properties that target end customers and most have the same dip on Saturday for the organic channel as well.
Check into where your target audience is from, different patterns for different folks but remember the first day of the weekend fewer people are usually on than on Sunday (same for Ebay better to end your auctions on Sunday, in general of course).

 

[Nut-Nights]

Google at its best. They want only money.

 

[patadeperro]

I don't know if this is a revelation for everyone or just me but... Adwords is affecting my impressions and ranking!

I started to run my Adwords campaigns every day apart from Saturday, and I started to see a crazy correlation. Every Saturday my Impressions, Clicks and Avg Pos will drop by at least 20% compared with the rest of the week!

Does anyone have any insight on this?

I have a lot of experience with adwords and yes they affect your ranks BUT not in the way you think, when you have your ads poiting to your domain Google needs to crawl it to "read it" all and assest the relevance of your site with the advertising and assign a Quality score for each add/keyword, basically it helps you to index the site faster furthermore allowing your site to be "seen" and "arranged" faster by Google even if you do not have as much authority as the other competitors.