If you run Google Ads and rank organically for the same search terms — brand bidding on your own name included — part of your ad budget is buying clicks you would have received for free. Google’s own research found that when a site holds the top organic position, only about 50% of its ad clicks are incremental — the rest would have arrived anyway.
Brand bidding: quick summary
- The problem: paying for ad clicks on search terms where you already rank in the top few organic positions.
- The evidence: Google’s own 2012 analysis of 390 studies found ad click incrementality varies sharply by organic rank — 50% at position 1, 82% at positions 2–4, 96% at position 5 and below.
- The nuance: this is not an argument for switching off brand bidding. Where competitors bid on your brand and you don’t defend it, research shows you lose a large share of those clicks.
- What to do: use Google Ads’ own paid & organic report to find the overlap, then test on a handful of terms and measure total leads and total cost — not ad cost alone.
- Time required: about 30 minutes to produce the list.
What is paid and organic search overlap?
Paid and organic overlap is when the same search query triggers both your Google Ads ad and your organic listing. The searcher sees you twice. You pay for one of those appearances.
It builds up quietly. Broad match and automated bidding widen the set of queries your ads can appear on over time, while your SEO work independently improves organic rankings on those same terms. Nobody notices the collision because ad spend and organic rankings usually live in two different reports, reviewed by two different people, on two different schedules.
Worth clearing up one thing first: buying ads does not help or harm your organic ranking. Google Search Central answers this directly — “Google’s advertising programs are independent of our search results.” The question here is purely commercial, not technical.
Brand bidding and incrementality: how much ad spend is actually extra?
The most useful answer comes from Google itself. In March 2012, Google researchers published a meta-analysis of 390 studies breaking ad click incrementality down by the advertiser’s organic rank for the same query.
| Your organic rank | Share of ad clicks that are incremental |
|---|---|
| Position 1 | 50% |
| Positions 2–4 | 82% |
| Position 5 and below | 96% |
Read the first row again. When you hold position one organically, Google’s own analysis found that roughly half of the clicks you pay for would have come to you free of charge.
That figure is often quoted the other way around. Google’s better-known 2011 paper concluded that “over 89% of the ads clicks are incremental” across 446 studies — a headline number frequently used to argue that paid search always adds. Both findings are Google’s, and both are true. The 89% is an average across all organic positions. The 2012 breakdown shows what that average conceals.
Two caveats you should hold onto. Neither paper was peer reviewed — both were authored by Google, which has a commercial interest in the finding. And the data is from 2011 and 2012, well before AI Overviews, Performance Max and the current results layout. Treat the direction as sound and the precise percentages as dated.
Does bidding on a keyword you already rank for reduce your organic clicks?
Yes, and this is the part that is well established in peer-reviewed work rather than vendor research.
Simonov, Nosko and Rao, publishing in Marketing Science in 2018, found that adding a brand ad “shifts nearly half of the clicks” away from the brand’s own organic listing and onto the paid ad. The clicks do not disappear. They simply move from the free column to the paid one.
The same study put the genuinely incremental effect of brand advertising at just 1–4% when no competitor was bidding on the brand — and found the effect was smaller for larger, better-known brands.
Should you turn off ads for terms you rank first for?
Not without testing. This is where a lot of advice goes wrong, and where an account can lose real volume.
The evidence is genuinely contested. The most cited study on the sceptical side is Blake, Nosko and Tadelis in Econometrica (2015), a large-scale field experiment at eBay which found that “brand-keyword ads have no measurable short-term benefits”. The authors themselves describe eBay as an extreme case — one of the most recognised brands in the world, with enormous direct navigation. Most Gold Coast businesses are not eBay.
A replication at Edmunds.com by Coviello, Gneezy and Götte found close to the opposite: more than half of paid traffic was lost when paid search was switched off. That paper remains a working paper rather than a peer-reviewed publication, but it is enough to show the question is not settled.
The honest position: overlap is a strong signal worth investigating, not a verdict. Test on a small set of terms, hold the test long enough to clear your sales cycle, and measure total leads and total cost across paid and organic together. Judging by ad cost alone will always make pausing look like a win.
Is brand bidding on your own name worth it?
Brand terms are the sharpest version of this problem and they deserve their own answer, because the obvious conclusion is the wrong one.
Yes, brand ads show the lowest incrementality of any keyword type. But Simonov, Nosko and Rao also measured what happens when a brand stops defending its own name: competitors bidding on that brand captured between 18% and 42% of the clicks. In those conditions the same researchers found the return on defensive brand advertising to be strongly positive.
So the deciding question is not “is this a brand term?” It is “is anyone else bidding on my brand?” Search your own business name and look at who appears above you. If the answer is nobody, your brand ads are doing less than you think. If competitors are there, the ad is buying protection rather than incremental traffic — a different justification, but a real one.
How do you find your brand bidding overlap in Google Ads?
Google Ads has a report built for exactly this, and most advertisers have never opened it.
The proper method: the paid & organic report
The paid & organic report shows paid, organic and combined performance for the same queries in one table. It requires your Search Console property to be linked to your Google Ads account.
- Link Search Console to Google Ads if you haven’t already.
- In Google Ads, go to Campaigns → Insights and reports → Report editor.
- Build a paid & organic report and add the combined ads and organic metrics.
- Sort by ad cost, highest first.
- Look for queries with high ad spend sitting alongside a strong average organic position.
Worth noting that Google promotes this report for the opposite use case — finding queries where you rank organically but run no ads, so you can add them. The same report answers both questions. You are simply reading it from the other end.
The 30-minute version, if Search Console isn’t linked
- Go to Campaigns → Insights and reports → Search terms.
- Set a custom date range covering the last 90 days. Google Ads has no 90-day preset — the longest fixed option is Last 30 days, so you’ll need to set the dates manually.
- Add the Cost column if it isn’t showing, then click the column heading to sort by it.
- Take your top 20 spending search terms.
- Search each one in an incognito window, from your service area, and note where you appear organically.
- Flag every term where you already sit in the top three.
One limitation to be aware of: the search terms report does not show every query. Google publishes only terms that have seen sufficient search volume across all Google searches, so your flagged list will be incomplete by design.
What should you do with the list?
Sort the flagged terms into three groups rather than treating them as one pile.
- High spend, organic position 1, no competitor ads. Your strongest test candidates. Google’s own data puts incrementality here at roughly 50%.
- High spend, organic position 1, competitors bidding. Leave these alone for now. You are paying for defence, and the research supports that.
- High spend, organic position 5 or worse. Leave them. At this rank Google’s data puts incrementality at 96% — the ad is doing genuine work.
Then run a real test on the first group. Pause or reduce bids on a handful of terms, not all of them. Give it enough time to clear your typical lead-to-sale lag. Compare total enquiries and total cost before and after, across both channels.
If total leads hold and total cost drops, you have found real waste. If total leads fall, you have learnt something equally valuable and you can switch the terms back on the same day.
Frequently asked questions
Does running Google Ads improve my organic rankings?
No. Google Search Central states plainly that its advertising programs are independent of its search results. Paying for ads neither helps nor harms organic ranking.
When should I stop brand bidding?
Only if no competitor is bidding on it. Research published in Marketing Science found competitors capture 18–42% of brand clicks when the brand doesn’t defend its own name. Check your brand results before deciding.
Is there a “last 90 days” option in the Google Ads search terms report?
No. Google Ads’ longest fixed date preset is Last 30 days. For a 90-day view you need to set a custom date range.
Why doesn’t the search terms report show all my search terms?
Google only reports search terms that have seen sufficient search volume across all Google searches. Low-volume queries are withheld, so the report is a large sample rather than a complete record.
How long should I run the test before deciding?
Long enough to cover your normal lead-to-sale lag, and long enough to gather a meaningful number of conversions. For most service businesses that means weeks rather than days. Judging after a few days measures noise.
Where this sits in a joined-up search strategy
This problem only exists because paid and organic are usually managed separately. When the same team plans both, the overlap gets caught at the keyword planning stage instead of being discovered months later in a spend review.
If you’d like the two halves working together, our Google Ads specialists and SEO services on the Gold Coast are run as one strategy rather than two line items — which is the whole idea behind our search marketing approach. You can see how we work on the DMKT Performance home page.
Sources
- Impact of Organic Ranking on Ad Click Incrementality — Chan & Van Alstine, Google Research, 27 March 2012 (390 studies)
- Incremental Clicks Impact of Search Advertising — Chan, Yuan, Koehler & Kumar, Google Inc., 2011 (446 studies, not peer reviewed)
- Competition and Crowd-Out for Brand Keywords in Sponsored Search — Simonov, Nosko & Rao, Marketing Science 37(2), 2018
- Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness — Blake, Nosko & Tadelis, Econometrica 83(1), 2015
- A Large-Scale Field Experiment to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Paid Search Advertising — Coviello, Gneezy & Götte, 2017 (working paper)
- About the paid & organic report — Google Ads Help
- About the search terms report — Google Ads Help
- Does advertising affect my site’s ranking? — Google Search Central
Want us to run a brand bidding check on your account?
We run this analysis across client accounts as standard — the paid & organic report, sorted properly, with the brand-defence question answered before anything gets paused. You get the list, the reasoning, and a test plan rather than a blanket recommendation.
Get in touch and we’ll take a look at where your paid and organic search are competing with each other.
