Organic Placement and AdWords Ads

AdWords has just released the results of a very interesting review. Although your results may be different it is worth taking a careful look-see. Here’s what the AdWords staff found:

  • On average, for advertisers who appear in the top rank organic slot, 50% of ad clicks are incremental. This means that half of all ad clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when search ads are paused.
  • For advertisers whose organic search results are in the 2nd to 4th position, 81% of ad clicks are incremental. For advertisers appearing in organic position of 5 or lower, 96% of ad clicks are incremental.

You can read the full blog post here.

The bottom line is that when you pause your AdWords ads and you have an organic position of 2 to 4 81% of your ad clicks are not replaced by organic generated clicks. For websites in position 5 or lower when you stop your ads 96% of your ad clicks are not replaced by organic generated clicks.

I personally feel that many website benefit from the exposure that Google AdWords ads bring even if they have fairly good organic placement.