{
  "slug": "paying-for-owned-term",
  "name": "Paying for an owned term",
  "aliases": [
    "Wasted-spend candidate",
    "Paid on owned keyword"
  ],
  "definition": "A per-keyword flag marking an overlapping keyword whose organic average position is already at or better than the chosen rank threshold.",
  "category": "Paid and organic",
  "type": "derived metric",
  "unit": "flag per keyword, plus a count of flagged keywords",
  "direction": "neutral",
  "verification": "verified",
  "calculation": "For each keyword in the paid-and-organic join, the flag is true when the organic average position is a positive number at or better than the rank threshold, which defaults to the top three. The response also carries the count of flagged keywords.",
  "aggregation": "A per-row boolean and its count. It is analysis on top of the joined frames, computed in the tool rather than defined in the semantic layer, and it is labelled as such.",
  "grain": "One flag per overlapping keyword.",
  "dimensions": [
    "keyword"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "date_range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "google-ads",
    "search-console"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "paid-organic-overlap-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "paid-organic-balance"
  ],
  "verbs": [
    "paid_organic_overlap"
  ],
  "rungs": [
    "R5"
  ],
  "levers": [
    "L8"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Which keywords are we buying that we already rank top-3 for?",
    "Where might paid spend be redundant?"
  ],
  "interpretation": "A candidate list, not a verdict. The tool ships its own caveat with the number: paying for a term you rank for does not prove the paid click would have arrived for free, and only a controlled pause test can settle that. The right output of this metric is a test design with day-7, day-14 and day-30 readouts.",
  "caveats": [
    "Overlap is not cannibalization, the payload states this in its own caveat field.",
    "The threshold is a caller-chosen parameter defaulting to the top three, so the flagged count moves with the parameter and is not comparable across calls that used different thresholds.",
    "Organic position is an impression-weighted average over the period, so a keyword that ranked well for part of the period can clear the threshold.",
    "The position lookup runs only for the paid-cost-ranked overlap candidates up to the row cap, so a keyword below that cut can never be flagged however well it ranks.",
    "A rank threshold says nothing about whether the paid and organic results appeared on the same result pages.",
    "Slowest contributing source is Google Search Console."
  ],
  "freshness": "1 to 2 days behind, Google's own reporting lag. Any answer touching the last 48 hours says so on the card.",
  "failureModes": [
    "Pausing spend on the flagged list without a holdout and reading the resulting organic traffic as recovered clicks.",
    "Comparing flagged counts across periods that used different thresholds."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [
    {
      "slug": "paid-organic-keyword-overlap",
      "why": "Overlap is the whole intersection; this flag is the rank-qualified subset of it. Reporting the flagged count as the overlap overstates the spend at issue."
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "paid-organic-keyword-overlap",
    "paid-ad-cost"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}