Most Search Ad Clicks Incremental; Organic Ranking Has Some Impact

On average, half of the search ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental, meaning that visits to the advertiser’s site from the ad clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when the search ads are paused, says Google in a March 2012 follow-up to a 2011 report. Looking at 390 search ad pause studies, Google found that when the organic search result was between 2 and 4, incrementality of the ad clicks rose to 82%, while 96% of the ads were incremental when the organic result ranked lower than 4. (more…)