Monitor the interplay between your organic and paid traffic

One effective way to use paid versus organic data is to monitor how well your organic traffic supports and makes up for changes changes to your paid ad spend—and vice versa. For example, if you were to decrease your paid spend for a given time period, you would want to monitor how much of that traffic is picked up by organic or other channels. If organic search picks up the deficit caused by reduced paid budget, then you can argue to allocate those paid dollars to areas where you have less visibility.

Another scenario may be goal oriented. Many teams measure the success of their SEO efforts by how much organic search represents total traffic. If you notice the percentage of organic traffic decreasing relative to paid and other channels, you can dedicate resources to optimize or create new content for those weaker areas. 

After you integrate your Google Analytics property with Conductor, you can easily visualize the breakdown of paid and organic data in the Pages report. Doing this allows you to see how the two channels support each other over time.

1. In Conductor, to to the Pages↗️ report.
2. At the top of the report, above the Your Content’s Organic Performance graph, select the Paid vs Organic view.
   
3. In the graph, hover your cursor over the data points for the different reporting time periods to see the traffic breakdown between organic search, paid search, and other channels.
   
   
   Did you have a change to your paid spend? If so, did that affect your overall paid traffic? Did your organic traffic during the same period make up for any lost traffic from paid? If so, consider dedicating more resources to either (or both):
   • Your content program to earn that traffic back.
   • Your paid spend to more quickly recoup losses in traffic.

What's next?

Now that you've reviewed your content's performance for in paid, read on below to see how to learn more about paid and organic synergy from your keyword performance.