Most stores I look at run Google Ads and SEO as separate exercises, often with different people or agencies on each, reporting into different spreadsheets. Nobody’s doing anything wrong. It’s just that neither side can see the other’s data, so nobody can answer a fairly basic question.
Which searches are you paying for that you already rank first for organically? And which ones is nobody covering at all?
Both answers are sitting in data you already have.
The join is simple, the insight isn’t obvious until you see it
You need two exports. The search terms report from Google Ads, which is what people actually typed, not what you bid on. And the queries report from Search Console, with position and clicks.
Match them on the query. Four groups fall out.
Paying and ranking well. You’re first or second organically and buying the click anyway. Sometimes that’s a deliberate defensive choice. Often nobody decided it, and it’s the most obviously reviewable spend on the account.
Paying and ranking badly. Ads are doing a job here that organic can’t do yet. This group justifies its spend and also tells you where content would eventually earn its keep.
Ranking well, not paying. Working as intended, and worth protecting.
Neither. Searches that convert for you in Ads but have no organic presence at all, or search demand you’re visible for in neither channel. This is usually the most interesting group and the one nobody has looked at.
Why it matters more for a store
Because ecommerce has more overlap than most sectors. Product and brand terms, category terms, and the long tail of specific model numbers all appear in both channels, and the same search can be bought and earned at once.
It also matters because the cheap conclusion is wrong. The temptation on finding you’re paying for a term you rank first for is to switch the ads off and pocket the money. Sometimes that works. Sometimes the total clicks fall by more than the paid clicks you cut, because the two listings were doing different jobs on a crowded results page.
The honest version is that you can’t know without testing it, which is why I’d treat the analysis as a list of candidates, not a list of cuts.
How to test it without gambling the account
Take a small group of terms from the paying and ranking well bucket. Not your best sellers, not brand.
Pause them, leave everything else alone, and watch total sessions and total revenue for those terms, not just the paid figures. Give it long enough to mean something and be aware that seasonality will try to fool you.
If total revenue holds, you’ve found money. If it falls, you’ve learned that the two listings were working together on that search, which is worth knowing too.
What to do with the fourth group
The searches converting in Ads with no organic presence are the best content brief you’ll get, because they’re pre-validated. Somebody paid for that click and it turned into an order.
That’s a better basis for deciding what to write than a keyword tool’s volume estimate, and it’s specific to your catalogue and your customers. It usually points at category and comparison content instead of blog posts.
The reverse case, organic visibility on terms that never convert in Ads, is worth a look too. It sometimes means you’re attracting research traffic that was never going to buy, which changes what you’d expect that content to do.
The reporting problem underneath all this
Most of the difficulty here isn’t analytical, it’s organisational. Paid reports on paid, organic reports on organic, and nobody reports on the search as a whole.
If you’re commissioning both from different suppliers, it’s reasonable to ask for one view of total search: what you earned, what you bought, where they overlapped and where neither of you showed up. That question alone tends to improve the conversation.
I’ve built this analysis enough times to have tooling for it, which is on the Search Intelligence page, and the joined-up version of the work is under paid and organic planning.
Questions people ask
Should I stop bidding on terms I rank first for?
Not automatically. Test a small group and measure total revenue rather than paid revenue, because the two listings can be doing different jobs on the same results page. Cutting the ad sometimes loses more than it saves, and sometimes doesn’t. Your account will tell you which.
What about bidding on my own brand name?
It’s the most argued-about version of this question and it depends on whether competitors are bidding on your brand and what your organic listing looks like. It’s worth its own test rather than a rule, and it’s covered in more detail in should you bid on your own brand.
What do I need to run this analysis?
The search terms report from Google Ads and the queries report from Search Console, both covering the same period. Match them on query. A spreadsheet will do it for a small account, though it gets unwieldy past a few thousand rows.
How often is it worth redoing?
Quarterly is usually enough for a store, or after anything that changes the picture: a new range, a site migration, a significant change to spend.
We use different agencies for paid and organic. Is that a problem?
Not inherently, but somebody has to own the combined view or this question never gets asked. Requesting one report covering both is usually the fastest way to surface what’s being missed.
