Last week Google rolled out a brand new report to give users insights into how their paid and natural campaigns impact each other. The report combines information already available in Adwords with information from your Webmaster tools, to give you a holistic view of your performance on the search engine in one place.
Now you will be able to see performance divided into:
- when your paid ad was shown,
- when an organic listing displayed,
- and most interestingly, when organic and paid listings were shown at the same time.
To view this report, in your campaigns area go to
Dimensions >> View: Paid & Organic
Since this report is using WMT information, you need to link your webmaster tools account with your Adwords, to enable this functionality.
To do that, simply go to
My Account >> LinkedAccount >>Webmaster Tools
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Note that the report will only show data from the point it was linked onwards, it will not show historical data.
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Note also that if you link more than one domain, you will not be able to distinguish that traffic by domain in this report.
an example report
Increasing Volume
On the release of this report, Google heavily suggested that you use the information from your organic listings to add new keywords to your Adwords account. For example, you might see which organic keywords aren’t being shown with ads, and maybe add those to your Adwords campaigns to get even more volume. Certainly, if you are trying to improve reach and volume, this is something you could consider (as long as those terms are bringing valuable traffic in organic).
Controlling Cost
Having said that, not everyone wants to just keep increasing volumes. Many businesses have limited budgets, and when those budgets are exhausted, they might want to know where they can economise. They can use this report to see where their campaigns are overlapping, and consider removing ads where their organic listings are very strong.
Whether you use this report to add more volume, or reign in the costs, whenever you make changes you should monitor this report to check the impact of your paid ads on your organic listings.
