You know that you can use Google Ads reporting tools to understand how often your ads are showing to potential customers, and which keywords are triggering those impressions. With the paid & organic report, a predefined report you can view in your Google Ads account, you can also learn how often pages from your website are showing in Google’s free organic search results , and which search terms triggered those results to show on the search results page.
This information helps you better understand how paid text ads and organic search results work together to help you reach people searching online, use the organic results to identify new, potentially valuable keywords, and gain a holistic view of how your online presence is performing overall in terms of attracting views and clicks.
In this article, we’ll explain what specific insights you can gain from the paid & organic report and why these insights matter.
Link to Search Console to enable the paid & organic report
In order to use the paid & organic report, you’ll need to have a Search Console account for your website, and you’ll need to link that Search Console account to your Google Ads account. Search Console is a free Google tool that gives you data and tips to help you understand and improve your search traffic. Learn more about how to Link Search Console and Google Ads .
How to use the paid & organic report
Once you link your Google Ads and Search Console accounts, you’ll be able to view your organic search results right alongside the performance statistics for text ads in your Google Ads Search campaigns. Note that the paid & organic report counts performance of text ads only. It doesn't count statistics from Shopping ads or click-to-download ads.
Below are 3 simple and powerful use cases for this report.
Discover additional keywords
Use the report to discover potential keywords to add to your Google Ads accounts by looking for queries where you only appear in organic search with no associated text ads.
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You can identify queries with a low number of paid impressions by adding a filter for "ad impressions = 0" or "ad impressions < X." If you have multiple accounts, all organic search data will be imported in each account.
- Downloading a paid & organic report in a manager account (for Google Ads accounts with the same language and geo settings) will allow you to find duplicate organic queries and identify queries that have no paid text ad impressions across any accounts.
- You can also add an additional filter to identify queries containing specific text, like your brand name or your most important products and services.
Optimize presence on high-value queries
Use the report to improve your presence in paid text ad results and monitor your high-value queries for organic results.
- Identify relevant queries for your business that have low organic traffic volume and target these queries to strengthen your paid search presence.
- Consider showing a more useful, prominent, and differentiated message from your organic listing by tailoring your ad text and using assets.
Measure changes holistically
As you test website improvements or changes to bids, budgets, or keywords, you can more easily observe the impact across text ads, organic results, and combined traffic. You can also determine how changing your keyword bids increases or decreases overall combined clicks for related queries, and how they work to cost-effectively increase your overall traffic for your most important queries.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Investment in paid search has no impact on your organic search ranking. Google maintains a strict separation between our search business and our advertising business.
- Organic results are not constrained by your Google Ads campaigns’ ad targeting settings. In other words, your ads are limited by the languages and locations you target in your Google Ads account, but your organic search listings are not. That means it’s possible to have more organic impressions than paid impressions even if your campaigns have 100% impression share. For example, if your ad campaign for a given keyword is targeted just to the United States, an organic impression occurring in Canada would still show up in your paid & organic report for that keyword even though you don't advertise there.
- Your organic data is only reported back to the date you started importing it from webmaster tools, so you won't find historical organic data from before you established that link.
- The organic data you have is based on all domains you've linked to your account. Keep in mind that organic traffic can't be filtered to just a subset of linked domains.
Example
Karen runs a website that sells travel guides for destinations all over the world. When she reviews her paid & organic report, she notices that her site appears occasionally in organic search results for the search query "Belize vacations." She also notices that the organic clicks/query rate is relatively high, which means that lots of people searching for "Belize vacations" who come across Karen’s site listings actually click through to her site. Karen uses this as a great opportunity to attract even more people interested in her business to her site, and she decides to add keywords like "Belize vacations" to her relevant Google Ads campaigns.
Understanding the paid & organic report
The paid & organic report is a predefined report in Google Ads. To navigate to the report, click Campaigns in the left hand sidebar and open the “Insights and reports” tab. Click Report editor and open the “Basic” Campaign tab.The report is updated once a day.
Here are the columns found in the paid & organic report and definitions for each metric:
| Ads | |
|---|---|
| Ad Clicks | The number of times someone clicked your text ad when it showed for a particular query. |
| Ad Impressions | How many times your text ad has appeared on a search results page. |
| Ad CTR | How often people who see your text ad end up clicking it. CTR can be used to gauge how well your keywords and ads are performing. |
| Ad Avg. CPC | The average amount you pay each time someone clicks your text ad. Average CPC is determined by totaling the cost of all clicks and dividing it by the number of clicks. |
| Organic | |
|---|---|
| Organic Clicks | The number of times someone clicked your site's listing in the unpaid results for a particular query. |
| Organic Queries | A web search. This column indicates the total number of searches that returned pages from your site over the given period. |
| Organic Clicks/Query | The number of clicks you’ve received on your organic search listings divided by the total number searches that returned pages from your site. |
| Organic Listings/query | A listing is when a page of your site is returned as a search result. This column indicates the average number of times a page from your site was listed per query. |
- one of your text ads
- one of your organic search listings
- returned a page from your site
- triggered one of your text ads
Though they're not shown by default, you can add Keyword, Ad Group or Campaign columns to your report by clicking Columns
