This may sound like a strange question. Your SEO strategy is somehow responsible for a decline in Google Ads PPC performance but that’s what happened. How is SEO impacting or influencing your paid media performance? Sometimes it can be hard to connect the dots. Let’s start with a hypothetical scenario.
SEO Clicks Begin To Decline
Ok, no biggy. SEO clicks were declining, down 8% last month. Ok, no big deal. Wait a minute. This has been happening every month since 2024 and now another 15% drop in March. It’s 2026 and now we’re now down 35%. This is starting to compound into fewer and fewer clicks each month. Year-over year is not looking good. That small drop is beginning to compound. Someone stop the bleeding!! Maybe its AI Overviews, maybe its ChatGPT? Maybe you stopped paying your agency to optimize for SEO because your heard a popular YouTuber saying SEO is dead and GEO is the future?
Fewer SEO Clicks = A Smaller Remarketing Audience
Over time, getting fewer and fewer clicks from organic search can really take a toll on your Google Ads remarketing audiences. That once great 30,000 30 day remarketing list is now down to 18,000. Your ads could take advantage of existing SEO clicks to help convert website visitors who already know your brand but are on other Google Networks or media websites. Now they need to rely more heavily on paying for Google Ads clicks for awareness AND conversions.
Smaller Audiences = Fewer Semi-Warm Leads
First time visitor SEO clicks can be a bit like a cold sales call or the very top of the marketing funnel. This is the first touch point with your brand. These folks are not ready to buy or submit a lead form but they’re interested. Removing these non-converting but semi-warm leads can have a major impact on conversions. Missing this top layer of the marketing funnel is a major disadvantage.
Fewer Warm Leads = Less Sales
Since you have fewer and fewer warm SEO clicks to convert, Google Ads needs to work harder and harder to get ROI from your campaigns. If you’re not leveraging customer lists or other 1st party data in your PPC campaigns, this means the campaigns are doing all the heavy lifting and will likely return below average ROI. Don’t expect great things from a campaign with limited data and less support from other channels. Good ROI comes from multiple channels all working together to deliver good ROI overall.
Other Reasons For Decline
Your Rockstar Marketing Manager Left
Let’s face it, there are people who are great at marketing, and then there are most marketers. Sometimes you make a great hire and the director of marketing decides to leave two years later. This time period of when the director leaves and when a new hire gets up to speed can sometimes lead to a decline in momentum. There was nothing SEO, social media, or your email campaigns could do. Running your marketing on auto-pilot for a few months is never a good idea. Unfortunately, many companies are stuck making due until the new hire can ramp up.
You Hired A Shady Agency
Not all PPC agencies are stand-up professionals. Some agencies try to lock customers into their services by limiting access to their analytics data or website. If you stop paying the agency, they can turn off your analytics or park your website. This practice can lead to weeks or months of missing data until you can come to an agreement and recover your data. Some clients may never recover their data and need to start a new account. Always make sure you have an agreement in place that clearly spells out who owns the data and for how long.
How Do I Get More Data?
Wether your data is going up or down, there are still ways to improve your performance with a multi-channel approach. Many companies are missing some or all of the potential data sources typically used for remarketing and retargeting ads.
Start by making sure your website is tagged correctly. Check Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to see if audience data is both tagged and flowing into your Google Ads audiences. Not all data will be available for remarketing but this should give you a good idea of your prospect audience.
- Prospect lists (permission)
- Past customers
- Newsletter sign-ups
- Linkedin, Meta, and other social media tracking tags
Keep in mind, your social channels may not provide all data to inform your PPC.
Not Sure? Get A Professional Audit
Getting a professional audit is a great first step in identifying issues with data and declines in audience activity. Sometimes data starts to disappear due to website tagging errors. Other times data can decline due to seasonality or an aggressive competitor. The only way to know for sure is to do a deep dive into your account.