Paid vs Organic Overlap: A$8,280-A$24,240 Annual Ad Spend Recoverable - Audit Findings & Recommendations

A Melbourne electrical services business - established operator, NDIS-registered, 4.9-star rated with 306 reviews, servicing inner-north and inner-east Melbourne suburbs - was running both Google Ads and SEO with the two channels managed separately and with no shared view of where they overlapped.

We were engaged to audit the overlap and identify where paid spend was redundant against existing organic positions, where paid spend was load-bearing because organic visibility did not exist, and where paid spend should reduce on a defined trigger as organic rankings improved post-migration.

The audit identified A$8,280 to A$24,240 per year of recoverable ad spend across three timeframes (immediate brand-term cuts, short-term Tier 1 keyword reductions, medium-term Tier 2 reductions).

The client’s identifying details have been anonymised. All metrics are verified through Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console. Recommendations were delivered as a written report; the client retained authority to decide which to action and on what timeline against their own commercial constraints. This case study is a record of what was found and what was recommended - not a record of what has been implemented.

The Setup: Two Channels, Zero Shared View

The account had been running both organic SEO (managed in-house with our consulting input) and Google Ads (managed separately) for over 12 months. Both channels were producing volume - 2,845 organic sessions vs 2,498 paid sessions over the audit window - but the question we were asked to answer was simple: where is the paid budget being spent on queries that organic already owns, and where is it load-bearing because organic cannot reach the page in time?

The starting data showed a counterintuitive pattern: organic was outperforming paid on every engagement and conversion metric, despite paid running at near-equal session volume.

Metric	Organic Search	Paid Search	Difference	Winner
Sessions	2,845	2,498	+347 (+13.9%)	Organic
Engaged sessions	1,889	1,377	+512 (+37.2%)	Organic
Engagement rate	66.4%	55.1%	+11.3pp	Organic
Avg engagement time	46.8s	28.0s	+18.8s (+67.1%)	Organic
Events per session	5.78	4.63	+1.15 (+24.8%)	Organic
Key events (conversions)	203	132	+71 (+53.8%)	Organic
Key event rate	5.41%	4.48%	+0.93pp	Organic

Translated into commercial terms: every paid conversion cost a CPC fee plus management overhead, while every organic conversion had zero marginal cost. Organic was already converting at a 20.8% relative improvement over paid, yet paid was running at full spend on queries the organic side was already winning.

That is the binary signal that triggered the overlap audit.

What We Found: Paid Bidding On Queries Organic Owned

Brand terms - paid spend on queries at organic position 1

The clearest waste pattern: paid bids running on the client’s own brand terms, where organic already held position 1 to 2.

Keyword	Organic Clicks	Organic Position	Recommendation
[client brand]	920	1.3	Stop paying. Organic dominates.
[client brand] services	70	1.9	Stop paying. Position 2.
[client brand] reviews	13	1.7	Stop paying. Position 2.

Estimated monthly paid clicks on brand terms: 75 to 150 at A$1.50 to A$3.00 CPC = A$110 to A$440 per month of pure-recovery spend.

Brand-term bidding has occasional defensive justification (block competitors from bidding on your brand). In this account, no competitor was bidding on the client’s brand at the time of audit, so the defensive case did not apply.

Strong organic positions where paid was redundant

Keyword	Organic Position	Impressions	Recommendation
ndis electrician	3.9	3,220	Reduce paid. Top 4 organically.
ndis registered electrician	5.8	1,134	Reduce paid. Position 6 and improving.
electrician fitzroy	2.9	7,021	Reduce paid. Position 3 with 7K impressions.
fitzroy electrician	2.4	760	Stop paying. Position 2-3.
electrician rosanna	4.3	2,294	Reduce paid.
electrician bundoora	1.7	401	Stop paying. Position 2.
electrician heidelberg	6.2	4,170	Monitor. Borderline. Reduce as position improves.

Combined trigger-based saving across this tier: A$280 to A$730 per month as organic positions cross threshold milestones.

Where paid was load-bearing - and should stay

Equally important: identifying where paid spend was the only realistic short-term traffic source. These are the high-impression suburb terms where organic was deep on page 3 to page 5 - too far to reach page 1 inside the audit horizon, with too much commercial volume to abandon.

Keyword	Impressions	Organic Position	Organic Clicks
electrician brighton	15,305	35.6	0
electrician st kilda	12,819	32.5	0
electrician malvern	12,414	26.4	0
electrician camberwell	12,487	23.5	2
electrician hawthorn	14,666	19.6	1
electrician box hill	9,610	34.0	0
electrician south yarra	7,861	25.3	0
electrician doncaster	7,599	31.2	1
electrician kew	6,840	32.9	1
electrician toorak	5,885	28.4	1
electrician armadale	9,978	18.8	1
electrician elwood	5,295	26.5	1
electrician richmond	4,000	25.4	0
electrician prahran	6,523	25.2	0
electrician glen iris	8,953	28.9	0
electrician windsor	9,044	35.0	0
electrician melbourne	1,117	46.9	6

Across these 17 keywords combined: roughly 143,400 monthly impressions with effectively zero organic clicks. Paid is the only short-term traffic mechanism. Recommendation: maintain paid spend on this tier until organic rankings cross the page-1 threshold post-migration.

The “home automation” outlier - paid carrying a service page

/services/home-automation was receiving 1,042 sessions - 6.5x the next-highest service page (/services at 159) - with no matching organic keyword volume in GSC. The page was almost certainly the primary Google Ads landing page for home automation campaigns. Recommendation: maintain paid spend on this service line. Organic does not currently rank for “smart home electrician” or “home automation electrician” Melbourne queries, and the engagement data (32.1s average time, 4.2% conversion rate) suggested well-targeted paid traffic landing on a conversion-optimised page. Adding the home-automation organic content cluster was added to the SEO roadmap as a future load-shedding lever.

The Recommendations: Trigger-Gated Paid Spend Reductions

The recommendations were structured as trigger conditions tied to organic position milestones - not blanket spend cuts. Each tier has an organic threshold; when the keyword crosses it, the corresponding paid bid reduces or stops.

Tier 1 - Immediate (Month 1 post-audit)

Action: Stop paid bidding on brand terms.

Keyword	Est. Monthly Paid Clicks	Est. CPC	Est. Monthly Saving
[client brand]	50 to 100	A$1.50 to A$3.00	A$75 to A$300
[client brand] services	20 to 40	A$1.50 to A$3.00	A$30 to A$120
[client brand] reviews	5 to 10	A$1.00 to A$2.00	A$5 to A$20
Subtotal			A$110 to A$440 / month

Trigger: None. Action was immediate-recommended because the organic positions held top 2 across all variants and no competitor was bidding on the brand at the time.

Tier 2 - Short-term (Months 2-4 post-migration)

Action: Reduce paid spend as organic rankings improve for keywords currently at position 3 to 10.

Keyword	Trigger To Reduce Paid	Est. Monthly Saving
ndis electrician	Organic position reaches top 3	A$100 to A$250
electrician fitzroy	Organic position holds top 3	A$80 to A$200
electrician rosanna	Organic position reaches top 3	A$30 to A$80
electrician heidelberg	Organic position reaches top 5	A$50 to A$150
electrician bundoora	Already position 2 - stop now	A$20 to A$50
Subtotal		A$280 to A$730 / month

Tier 3 - Medium-term (Months 4-8 post-migration)

Action: Reduce paid spend as Tier 2 suburb pages mature and cross page-1 organically.

Keyword Group	Condition	Est. Monthly Saving
Camberwell, Hawthorn, Surrey Hills	Organic reaches page 1	A$150 to A$400
Armadale, Caulfield, Elwood	Organic reaches top 10	A$100 to A$300
Suburb long-tail variants	Suburb pages rank naturally	A$50 to A$150
Subtotal		A$300 to A$850 / month

Total potential saving

Timeframe	Monthly Saving Range	Annual Equivalent
Immediate (brand terms)	A$110 to A$440	A$1,320 to A$5,280
Short-term (Tier 1 keywords)	A$280 to A$730	A$3,360 to A$8,760
Medium-term (Tier 2 keywords)	A$300 to A$850	A$3,600 to A$10,200
Total potential	A$690 to A$2,020 / month	A$8,280 to A$24,240 / year

These are conservative estimates based on Melbourne electrical industry CPC benchmarks. Actual savings depend on the client’s exact paid CPC rates (which require an export from their Google Ads search terms report) and the pace of organic ranking improvements.

What We Did Not Do

This was an audit and recommendation engagement, not a paid-management engagement. We delivered:

• The paid-vs-organic overlap analysis
• Three tiers of trigger-gated savings recommendations
• A list of where paid spend was load-bearing and should stay
• A reinvestment shortlist (where to redirect saved budget into content, link building, GBP optimisation, review generation, and CRO on lower-converting service pages)
• A list of audit data gaps that, if filled, would tighten the precision of the savings estimates (Google Ads search terms export, GA4 landing-page-by-channel exploration, Google Ads spend-by-campaign export, GBP performance data)

We did not:

• Pause keywords or reduce bids ourselves - the paid account remained under separate management
• Implement the recommendations - the client retained authority to action them on their own timeline
• Verify the exact paid CPC for each keyword - the audit window did not include a Google Ads search terms export
• Continue weekly account management - this was a one-shot audit deliverable

Where The Reinvestment Should Go

Saved spend was recommended to flow into four buckets, in priority order:

1. Content and link building - accelerate the Tier 2 and Tier 3 keywords toward page 1 (the deeper-page suburb terms where paid is currently load-bearing). Each ranked keyword displaces paid spend permanently.
2. Google Business Profile optimisation - the local pack is invisible in this audit (no GBP performance data was provided). For a Melbourne local services business, GBP often produces more high-intent calls than either organic or paid search.
3. Review generation - 306 reviews at 4.9 stars is strong. Pushing toward 500+ compounds local pack visibility for every nearby suburb query simultaneously.
4. Conversion rate optimisation - the contact page converts at 9.1%, the NDIS page at 8.5%. Lower-performing service pages have headroom; lifting the average converting service page from 3 to 6 percent doubles conversions on the same traffic.

What This Audit Demonstrates

When paid and organic are managed separately, the two channels do not see each other. Paid bids run on queries organic already owns at position 1. Organic content gets built in places paid is already winning. The result is two channels burning budget against each other.

The fix is not necessarily moving both channels under one operator (though that is what we recommend - one operator running both means search-term sweeps from Ads feed SEO content priorities, and organic ranking data feeds Ads negative-keyword and bid decisions). The minimum fix is what this audit produced: a written overlap map with trigger conditions, so spend reductions happen mechanically as organic rankings cross thresholds, and load-bearing paid spend is preserved where organic cannot reach in time.

The headline finding in one line: A$8,280 to A$24,240 per year of recoverable ad spend identified in a single overlap audit, gated against organic position triggers so reductions happen on data signal rather than guesswork - and a clear list of where paid spend should stay because organic cannot replace it in the relevant horizon.

Could Your Account Have This Pattern?

If your business runs both Google Ads and SEO and the two channels are managed by different teams, providers, or in different reporting cycles, the overlap is almost certainly there. Common signs:

• Paid spend shows on your own brand terms
• Service pages with disproportionate traffic compared to other service pages and no matching organic keyword volume
• Paid suburb-targeted campaigns where the suburb already ranks top 5 organically
• High-impression organic keywords sitting on page 3 to 5 with no paid coverage (the inverse problem - missed paid opportunity)

The audit produces three outputs: where to stop paid spend, where to reduce it on trigger conditions, and where to keep paying because organic cannot replace the volume. It is a one-shot piece of work that pays for itself in the first month for most accounts at over A$1,500 monthly paid spend.

See our Google Ads Management service or browse all services - or read our other Google Ads case study on the inherited-account-rescue side of the same intent-led methodology.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why is the client’s brand and suburb list anonymised?

The client requested anonymisation while we build out a portfolio of named case studies. Once five or more clients give written permission, we will publish those alongside verifiable brand and suburb detail. The savings estimates here remain auditable through the underlying GA4 and GSC exports.

Q: A$8K to A$24K is a wide range - why?

The audit window did not include a Google Ads search terms export with exact CPC data per keyword. The savings estimates use Melbourne electrical industry CPC benchmarks (A$1.50 to A$3.00 for brand terms, A$8 to A$25 for commercial suburb terms) as bounds. With a search terms export, the range tightens to a five-to-ten percent band. We deliberately reported the bounded range rather than picking a single point estimate to avoid implying precision the data did not support.

Q: Why did you recommend keeping paid spend on 17 suburbs at deep page-3-to-5 organic positions?

Those keywords combined produce roughly 143,400 monthly impressions with effectively zero organic clicks. Reaching page 1 from position 25 to 47 is a 6-to-12 month proposition with sustained content and link building. In the meantime, paid is the only short-term traffic source for those queries. Cutting paid would not save money - it would zero out a working revenue channel. The right move is reducing paid as each keyword crosses the page-1 threshold, not before.

Q: Did the client implement all the recommendations?

Implementation decisions sit with the client. We delivered the audit; they decide which recommendations to action and on what timeline against their own commercial constraints. This case study is a record of what was found and what was recommended, not a record of what has been implemented.

Q: Why not just take over the paid account ourselves?

We offered. The client’s existing paid agency had a longer-running relationship and the client preferred to keep that arrangement and pass the recommendations through internally. The audit deliverable was structured to be actionable by any competent paid manager - trigger conditions, savings ranges, keyword lists, and reinvestment priorities - rather than requiring our own team to implement. Where a client wants both channels under one operator, our Google Ads Management service bundles into the same engagement.

Q: How does this case study square with the price-beat guarantee?

The price-beat guarantee covers your current monthly website + hosting + SEO spend. The audit recommendation here exists outside that guarantee - it is a one-shot deliverable that identifies recoverable paid spend the client can capture by adjusting their existing paid arrangement. The reinvestment opportunities (content, link building, GBP, reviews, CRO) are services we deliver under our standard ongoing SEO engagement.

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Want a free paid-vs-organic overlap audit on your own account? Get in touch - we will cross-reference your GA4 channel data, GSC organic positions, and (if available) your Google Ads search terms export to identify exactly where the overlap is. No obligation, no sales calls.

All metrics independently measurable through Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console. Savings estimates are bounded ranges based on Melbourne electrical industry CPC benchmarks; actual figures require Google Ads spend data to confirm precisely.