Discover quick PPC cost savings in keywords with organically high-ranking content

Typically, your paid and organic data sets live in different places, but you can use Conductor to measure the organic rankings of your paid search terms to help identify keywords where you should either increase or decrease your PPC (pay-per-click) spend.

In this workflow, you can review a keywords group of your paid terms in the Keywords report to measure rankings and learn where you can bid down or bid up in your paid strategy.

Keywords to Potentially Bid Down

Organic marketers should identify scenarios where they own both the number one organic search ranking and the number one paid search ranking. For some organizations, this is the ideal state. You may want to continue bidding on these terms to take up more real estate at the top of the search engine results. But, you may want to decrease your bids on those terms in paid search to save money with the knowledge that your top organic ranking will still drive traffic to your website.

Keywords to Increase Organic Spend 

It is equally important to identify keywords where both your paid and organic search rankings have low visibility. Business critical keywords that fall into this category should be prioritized for increased paid spend and organic search optimization to ensure you can improve search engine traffic to your website. 

1. Create a standard keyword group for the list of paid search keywords you are interested in measuring. Your Paid Search Manager or any member of your Demand Generation team should be able to supply you with a list of active keywords being used in Google Ads campaigns. You can share this resource from Google Ads to assist the download of the search term reports.
2. In Conductor, go to the Keywords↗️ report.
3. In the Keywords report, set the Keyword Groups menu to your newly created paid search keyword group.
4. Identify terms where you may want to decrease your paid search bid. Use the Rank column filter to identify keywords ranking within the top three search positions. These keywords will still drive organic traffic if you were to reduce or eliminate paid spend. In the scenario below, you might consider spending less on branded terms for “Bed Bath & Beyond” due to their high search volume and our number one organic search rankings.
5. Identify paid terms where you have neither a paid ad nor an organic ranking on page one. Set the Rank column filter to 11-20. Keywords in the table are driving neither organic nor paid search traffic, but represent the best opportunity for improvement. For example, if the data in the table shows us ranking in position #17 for the highly searched term “kitchen island”, you could use this information to justify increased spend on the keyword, along with pursuing the organic search optimization of the current ranking landing page. 

What's next?

Curious about other ways to improve your SEO–PPC synergy? Read on!