Within this, one of the core challenges marketers face is measuring the incremental value of their paid search versus organic coverage. 

Search marketing is fundamental to most digital advertiser’s strategy, yet many don’t know the true value, and overlap their paid and organic coverage. Few can say with absolute certainty that there aren’t any keywords that they’re over or under bidding on – with most search performance experiencing overlap.

As a result, most marketers end up asking themselves the age-old questions:

1. Is paid search actually worth it
2. If I were to turn it off, how much would my organic pick up?
3. How can I find a way to only spend money when it’s adding value?

The truth is, if you isolate your paid and organic channels you end up wasting ad spend, devaluing SEO as a practice, and miss the opportunity to truly measure the value of SEO. 

So how do you guarantee search efficiency and stop your paid ads cannibalizing your organic coverage? We asked our experts just that:

How to Reduce Search Cannibalization

Achieving search incrementality can often be derailed by trying to solve everything all at once, the key is to focus on the overlap, only leveraging paid channels when they add value above organic. 

Search cannibalization can be avoided by removing channel siloes – switching from individual KPIs and optimizing towards cross-channel profits: Paid Revenue + Organic Revenue – Paid Costs.

Leveraging Machine Learning

Essentially you need a machine learning bid strategy that factors in organic. By setting the bid for text ads relevant to Shopping performance and organic data – you can reduce any areas of cannibalization as well as any missed opportunities.

And this is exactly what our machine learning model, Seamless Search does – finding the optimum bids to drive maximum incremental returns. Pushing bids via the Google Ads API every day for each keyword, by each device.

This in turn provides us with a pipeline to manage paid and organic search activity in unison:

Why Search Efficiency Matters

Google has recently made a major update to the SERPs, with Ads eligible to show in the middle of the page below organic listings – giving even more chance for unnecessary cannibalization if managed incorrectly.

Removing channel siloes allows you to get maximum value from your SEO – and Seamless Search can help you do this. Connecting the data to give unprecedented insights – allowing brands to:

1. Put monetary value to organic ranking improvements
2. Give guidance for areas of opportunity
3. Understand how competitor paid strategies affect your SEO

Seamless Search in Action

UK health and beauty retailer asked Incubeta to maximize the efficiency of their paid search spend, and reduce the risk of their paid activity cannibalizing their organic coverage.

Using Seamless Search, we assessed millions of data points, pulling keyword level data from Google Ads and Search Console to model a picture of total revenue achieved by keywords. We then automated Paid bidding decisions based on a search term’s organic position. To understand the value of the bid changes applied by the Seamless Search platform, an A/B testing feature was built to see how performance of a control group, not managed by the platform, would compare.

Analysis after the first 90 days showed +102% Higher total ROAS from Seamless keywords, a £53.3k Incremental return from Total Search and 50% lower CPC’s with a minimal disruption to CTR.

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For more information on Seamless Search watch the full event recording, Unlocking Search Efficiency, or get in touch using the form below and one of our expert specialists will be in touch shortly:

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