Research Study

Impact of Ranking of Organic Search Results on the Incrementality of Search Ads

the rundown

Our Search Ads Pause study in 2011 found that when search ads are turned off, clicks from organic results don’t make up for lost traffic — not by a long shot. In fact, 89% of visits to an advertiser’s site from search ads were incremental to those from organic results. Here, we dug deeper into the data, examining the relationship between incrementality of the ad clicks (IAC) and the ranking of organic results. We found several interesting trends. For example, 66% of ad clicks occur when there's no search result at all. And even when advertisers appear in the top ranked organic slot, half of ad clicks are still incremental.