A practical framework for the most common search budget question: should you run ads on terms where you already rank organically? It depends on four things.
It is the most common question we get from clients who run both channels: we rank first for this term, so why are we also paying for it? Sometimes the honest answer is that you should not be. But not always, and the difference comes down to four things you can check in an afternoon.
The short answer
Pay when the ad wins traffic you would genuinely lose without it, and stop paying when it mostly cannibalises clicks your organic listing would take anyway. The mistake is treating this as a philosophy. It is a measurement question, and it has a different answer for every term.
1. Who else is on the page?
If competitors run ads above your first-position organic listing, your ranking is not really first. On commercial terms where the ad slots push organic below the fold, especially on mobile, pulling your ad hands the top of the page to a competitor. On pages where few or no ads show, the calculation reverses.
2. What does the incrementality test say?
Opinion is not evidence. Pause the ad on a defined set of terms, hold everything else steady, and watch total clicks (paid plus organic) for the term over a few weeks. If total traffic holds, the ads were substituting. If it drops meaningfully, they were incremental. We run this as standard within our performance and incrementality testing work, and it settles arguments that would otherwise run for quarters.
3. Does the landing page differ?
Organic rankings take you to the page Google chose. Ads take visitors to the page you chose, with the message you chose. When a promotion, a specific offer, or a high-converting landing page matters more than the click itself, the ad earns its keep even where rankings are strong.
4. Is the query defensive?
Branded terms deserve their own logic. Defending your brand from competitor ads is often cheap insurance; paying full price for navigational clicks with no competition is often waste. Check whether anyone actually bids on your brand before spending to defend it.
Run the channels as one system
The deeper point is that this question should not need to be asked across a wall between two teams. Shared search term data, shared margin data and one view of the search results page is how we plan search for clients, and it is why our SEO and paid practices work from one integrated search strategy. That is also how one retail partner generated over £1.4m across paid and organic in a single year: not by choosing a channel, but by refusing to let the channels compete with each other. If your paid and organic teams meet only at the invoice, we would be glad to give you a second opinion on what the overlap is costing.
