Paid vs Organic Traffic: Are they friends or eating from the same plate?
I’ve seen both sides.
While working with start-ups where they are still looking for Product-market-fit, every rupee we put into paid campaigns had a side-effect:
👉 organic traffic and brand searches also went up.
Paid visibility created curiosity, and people came searching on their own.
But at established brands, the story was different. At scale, we noticed something else—paid was often eating into organic.
People who would have come directly or through SEO ended up clicking ads instead. Dashboards showed growth, but the incrementality was questionable.
That’s when I realized:
For early-stage brands, paid fuels organic.
For established brands, paid sometimes just shifts traffic from organic.
The mistake is to see paid as always “additive.” The smarter way is to test for incrementality and find the right mix. You need to have right attribution kicking in to get the real insights.
Otherwise, paid can spark the fire, Organic keeps it burning.
The art is in knowing when it fuels, and when it overlaps.
👉 Have you seen paid fueling or eating into organic in your campaigns? Drop your experience below—I’d love to learn from the community.