There’s definitely a correlation between paid ad traffic and organic website visits, starting with users visiting across multiple devices (you found me with an ad on my mobile FB news feed, I’ll be back from my iPad or laptop). There’s also an inability to track some devices or users, that’s just a technical reality. I do believe that GA4 maintains the capacity to accurately show you your “organic search” activity, it’s the “direct” and other nondescript sources in GA4 reports that’ll contain the rest.

Consider pulsing your ad campaigns, or looking at the before and after where a client’s ad budget changed dramatically. There’s no single formula here, it takes some sleuthing, and be careful not to discount offline marketing activities as drivers of direct and organic site traffic. In some cases, general market activity can dramatically impact organic site traffic. Still though, take a look and plot organic search and other/direct (sum of all unpaid that are not organic search) over time. Weekly is fine, give yourself a 2 or 3 month window pre- and post budget change. You’ll need to sprinkle some gut feel onto this, related to offline marketing, seasonality, and some other factors. Also, you don’t want to be doing this sort of thing incorrectly or you’ll jerk the wheel into a bridge abutment; find an expert, should you need one.

Brand keywords deserve a mention as well, where it can be very interesting to see what happens if you prevent your ads from appearing for your brand’s search queries. Because there is not real “exact match” any more, and Performance Max campaigns have one foot in the SEM space without lending any real controls to us, this can require account-level negatives. If you wanted, you could house your brand keywords and campaigns in an additional Ads Account. With that, you can turn it on, off, up, or down at will, without impacting the other campaigns.

This sort of analysis is another reason why I like the use of distinct vanity URLs in direct mail campaigns, as a way to accurately ID the source of that site traffic. Not every digital ad click can be traced (device/browser limitations), and not every direct mail customer will use the vanity URL. Still though, it’s nice to do as much house cleaning as possible.

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