Balancing Paid and Organic Search for a National Supplement Brand

Task

Our client, knowledgeable in search strategy, had two concerns – the cost of the paid search campaign and the risk that the campaign was cannibalizing organic traffic.

Challenge

The priority for us was ensuring a reduced paid search campaign spend did not cause a drop in total clicks to the website and overall sales. Any lost paid search clicks needed to convert from organic traffic.

Our challenge was to create a test plan to modify budgets and bidding strategies to find the balance point between paid search spend and customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Solution

We decided to test different bidding strategies on Google and then apply the lessons to Bing. By focusing on Google, we could take advantage of the Paid & Organic Google Ads report. This report tracks combined query and click data, showing us how traffic changes in relationship to our reduced target cost per action (tCPA).

Over a 12 week period we tested a range of bidding strategies and budgets to find the point where traffic and sales did not suffer. Any clicks we lost to paid search needed to convert from organic search traffic.

Each week we reduced our tCPA by 10% until we reached a point where a reduction would not impact the cost per action (CPA). For a final test, we reduced the tCPA beyond 10% to determine threshold levels.

Results

At the end of 12 weeks, we found the ideal balance for paid and organic search impressions, allowing us to reduce the CAC by close to 50%, while still earning the same volume of clicks, awareness, and sales.

The client is pleased with this update to their paid search campaign and continues to see strong paid and organic traffic to their site.