SEO and PPC: Are Your Shopping Ads Paying for Organic Sales?

Partly, and more so on searches where your site already ranks first, such as your store’s name. Google’s pause studies of search ads found that, with a top organic result, organic clicks made up for half the ad clicks on average. With no organic result, they made up for none. Check the overlap query by query, then take one category out of ads as a test. Before you cut a category that doesn’t sell in ads, compare its ad results with its GA4 organic orders and the store’s total orders.

Does Google Ads help or hurt your SEO?

Not directly. Google Ads Help (About measuring paid and organic search results) puts it plainly: “Investment in paid search has no impact on your organic search ranking.” Your rankings stay the same whether you buy ads or pause them. Your organic traffic, the visits from unpaid results, rises and falls for other reasons.

The two channels meet on the results page. One shopper types one query and may see your Shopping ad, your free listing and your category page at the same time. The question that costs money is which of those listings gets the credit for the sale, and whether you needed the ad at all. The ecommerce SEO guide covers how a store that already advertises should approach SEO as a whole.

SEO vs Google Ads: how they differ for an online store

For a store, the comparison is product ads and free listings, both built from one product feed, against category and product pages that rank on their own. Product ads run in Shopping campaigns and in Performance Max, the Google campaign type that serves ads across several networks.

“Organic” now covers more than the classic list of links. According to Google Search Central (AI features and your website), Search Console counts clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode in its Performance report, under the Web search type.

The feed is the part both channels share. According to Google Search Central (Where ecommerce content can appear on Google), products appear in the Shopping tab when you upload them to Merchant Center. Google opened that tab to free listings in April 2020, starting in the US, and said free listings would add to advertisers’ paid campaigns (It’s now free to sell on Google). So a weak product title or a wrong product category costs you in ads and in free listings at once.

Do Shopping and Performance Max ads take sales organic would have made?

Some, and the share depends on where you rank. Public numbers on this come from Google’s own research on search ads.

• In more than 400 pause studies, on average 89% of ad clicks were incremental: when the ads were paused, organic clicks did not make up for them (Incremental Clicks Impact Of Search Advertising, 2011).
• A follow-up analysis of 390 studies split this by organic rank (Impact Of Ranking Of Organic Search Results On The Incrementality Of Search Ads, 2012). On average, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks happened with no organic result from the advertiser for that search. When the advertiser’s organic result ranked first, 50% of ad clicks were incremental. With no organic result, 100% were.

Read these numbers with four caveats. Google sells the ads, so it studied its own product. The studies cover search ads in 2011–2012, before free listings in the Shopping tab and before Performance Max. They count clicks, not sales, and they are averages across advertisers, not a forecast for your store.

The direction still helps, because it tells you where to look first:

Performance Max adds one more layer. Performance Max attribution looks at how much of the revenue it reports comes from brand searches, returning customers and remarketing, and would have come anyway.

Why your store’s revenue and Google Ads revenue don’t match

Google Ads reports revenue from advertising: the value of orders it could trace back to its own ads. Your store records every order, including those from organic search, direct visits, email and repeat customers. So when the store’s total is higher than the ad account’s, part of the gap is organic sales, not lost tracking. Before you blame the tags, split the store’s orders by source: reconciling Google Ads with store orders shows how.

GA4 does that split for visits to your site, but its channel names hide a trap for stores. This is how Analytics Help (Default channel group) sorts Google traffic:

Compare Paid Shopping with Organic Shopping, and you leave out Performance Max, which GA4 files under Cross-network. For most stores that is where the money is. Performance Max runs in 141 of 146 stores in our data and takes a median 95.7% of their ad budget (GetProfit data, June 2025 – June 2026).

How to check the overlap for your store

Six checks, from the quickest to the most reliable:

1. Split your brand searches from the rest. If your site ranks first for your store’s name, these are the searches where Google’s studies found only half the ad clicks incremental. Look at their ad spend and sales separately, so they don’t hide in a campaign average.
2. Link Search Console to Google Ads and open the paid and organic report. It shows each query’s ad clicks, organic clicks and both combined. Know its limits: Google Ads Help says it counts text ads in Search campaigns only, not Shopping ads. Organic data starts on the day you link the accounts, and the report updates once a day. For a store that runs almost everything through Performance Max, it covers a small slice of spend.
3. Put your ad search terms next to your organic queries. Google Ads reports search terms with their cost, Performance Max included (campaign_search_term_view, Google Ads API). Search Console gives queries and pages with clicks, impressions and average position, for the last three months by default (Performance report (Search results)). Mark the queries where you rank near the top and still pay for many ad clicks. These are your test candidates.
4. Compare ad clicks and free clicks per product in Merchant Center. Its product performance data separates organic from ads (MarketingMethod, Merchant API). You can also break it down by your own product types (ProductPerformanceView).
5. Read GA4 by channel for the same pages. Put Organic Search and Organic Shopping on one side, Paid Shopping, Cross-network and Paid Search on the other. Expect Search Console clicks and GA4 sessions to differ: Google says it counts the two differently, so they won’t match completely (Using Search Console and Google Analytics data for SEO).
6. Test by switching off. Take one category, or your brand searches, out of ads for a few weeks. Watch the store’s total orders for that category against a similar category that keeps its ads. Ignore ad revenue: without ads it drops to zero by definition. Google’s pause studies rest on the same idea: pause the ads and see how much organic traffic takes their place.

The third check also works the other way round. Search terms that already brought sales through your ads are the first ones to target on your category and product pages. That is where ecommerce keyword research starts.

Some categories spend over a third of their ad budget on products with no sales in ads

In our study of 1.4 million products in 130+ stores over 13 months, car parts spent 37.6% of their ad budget on products with no sales. Tools and building materials spent 33.8%, and these two were the highest shares in the study. Yet tools had a ROAS of 776% in the same table, meaning revenue was 7.76 times ad spend. A category can pay back on average while a third of its money goes to products that don’t sell through ads.

That is ads data, and it has a blind spot. Our data comes from ad accounts, so it can show that a product or a category doesn’t sell in ads. It cannot show whether the same products sell through organic search, direct visits or repeat customers. So on its own, “doesn’t sell in ads” is a reason to change the ad budget, not to take a category out of your store.

Before you cut a category that doesn’t sell in ads

“Doesn’t sell in ads” covers two different situations. Tell them apart first.

• The category barely shows. Most of its products got no impressions at all. These products never had a test in ads, so the verdict on them is still open.
• The category shows and spends, but returns little. This is a real result, but only for ads. It says nothing yet about organic search.

For the second case, collect four numbers for the same period. Take at least 90 days, and a whole season if the category is seasonal.

1. Ads: spend, orders and revenue for the category’s products in Google Ads.
2. Organic search: in Search Console, clicks and average position for the category page and its product pages.
3. Organic sales: in GA4, orders and revenue from Organic Search and Organic Shopping visits that landed on those pages.
4. The store’s total: orders for the category’s products from all sources, taken from your back office.

Then read them together:

For the first row, category page SEO covers what to put on the category page and what to do with a category of only a few products.

The portal’s assortment section covers the ads half of this check for your own account. It walks the catalogue from the feed to sales over 90 days. It separately names the categories where nine out of ten ads-ready products got no impressions. Then it sorts the notable product groups into four lists: Working well, Expand, Limit and repurpose, Give a test.

“Limit and repurpose” is a verdict about the ad budget: cut it there and move it to what works. The portal reads your Google Ads and Merchant Center, not your organic sales. So the organic half decides whether a category stays in your store.

Example: two categories with no orders from ads

Example store, not client data.

A tableware store with 3,000 products spends 40,000 a month on ads, or 120,000 over 90 days. Two of its categories got no orders from ads in that window.

Glassware takes 5% of the ad budget and sells nothing through ads, yet its category page brings 9 organic orders at the store’s average order value of 600. The store moves those 6,000 to categories that pay back in ads and keeps the glassware page. It also checks the glassware titles and product category in the feed, since ads and free listings both read them. Kitchen textiles find no buyers in any channel, so they go to the range review.

When to lean on ads, and when on organic

See which part of your catalogue works. The portal walks the whole catalogue through the stages — from the feed to sales, shows where the budget goes by product group, and answers whether you really have a season. The portal changes nothing without your consent.

Break down your catalogue →

Sources

• About measuring paid and organic search results — Google Ads Help: paid search spend has no impact on organic ranking; the paid and organic report needs a linked Search Console account, counts text ads in Search campaigns only and not Shopping ads, has organic data only from the link date and updates once a day. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Incremental Clicks Impact Of Search Advertising — Google research, 2011: over 400 Search Ads Pause studies; on average 89% of ad clicks were not made up for by organic clicks when ads were paused. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Impact Of Ranking Of Organic Search Results On The Incrementality Of Search Ads — Google research, 2012: 390 studies; 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks with no associated organic result; 50% of ad clicks incremental with a top-ranked organic result, 100% with none. Checked 2 October 2026.
• AI features and your website — Google Search Central: traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in Search Console’s Performance report, Web search type. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Where ecommerce content can appear on Google — Google Search Central: products reach the Shopping tab through Merchant Center. Checked 2 October 2026.
• It’s now free to sell on Google — Google, 21 April 2020: the Shopping tab opened to free listings, first in the US with global expansion planned, and free listings add to paid campaigns. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Default channel group — Analytics Help: Shopping campaigns go to Paid Shopping, Performance Max to Cross-network, Search campaigns to Paid Search, free listings to Organic Shopping; Organic Search includes AI Overviews and AI Mode. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup — Search Console Help: clicks, impressions, CTR and average position by query and page; three months by default. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Using Search Console and Google Analytics data for SEO — Google Search Central: Search Console clicks and Analytics sessions are calculated differently and won’t match completely. Checked 2 October 2026.
• campaign_search_term_view — Google Ads API: search terms with cost metrics; Performance Max data is excluded only when keyword segments are used. Checked 2 October 2026.
• MarketingMethod and ProductPerformanceView — Merchant API: product performance segmented by marketing method (organic versus ads) and by the merchant’s own product type. Checked 2 October 2026.
• GetProfit data: study of 1,404,808 products in 130+ stores over 13 months — share of ad budget on products with no sales and ROAS by category.
• GetProfit data: 146 stores, June 2025 – June 2026 — share of ad budget in Performance Max.
• GetProfit portal — assortment section: catalogue stages over 90 days, categories without impressions, four verdict lists for product groups.