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On most searches a listing’s organic rank, not its ads, decides most of its sales: shoppers see the top of the page and click it far more than anything below. How much paid advertising lifts that organic rank is an important open question, and it has not been measured.

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How organic rank becomes sales

For one listing on one search, organic sales in a month are: organic sales=searches×impression share(r)×CTR(r)×CVR×order value\text{organic sales} = \text{searches} \times \text{impression share}(r) \times \text{CTR}(r) \times \text{CVR} \times \text{order value} where rr is the listing’s organic rank. Impression share is the share of the search’s shoppers who see the listing at all, and CTR is the share of those who click it. Both fall as the rank gets worse; conversion and order value are the listing’s own.

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How many shoppers see each rank

Almost every shopper who searches sees the first rows of page one, and fewer scroll further. On the accounts we manage, a listing ranked anywhere in the top ten is seen by about 65 to 75% of the shoppers who make the search; the share falls to about 60% at ranks 11 to 12, about 50% at ranks 13 to 24, about 20% at ranks 25 to 48, and about 10% below that.

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How often they click

Organic click-through falls steadily with rank. A listing ranked #1 is clicked on about 2.5% of the times it is shown, #2 on 1.5%, #3 on 1.2% and #4 on 0.9%; from there the rate keeps falling, roughly as rank to the power of -0.78, to a floor of about 0.37% beyond rank 10. There is no cliff after the first row: ranks 7 to 8 click about 1.5 times as often as ranks 9 to 10, close to the 1.4 times between ranks 5 to 6 and 7 to 8. The levels drift from week to week as the mix of listings changes (rank #1 measured anywhere from 1.1% to 9.5% in single weeks); the shape does not. Treat the levels as an average across the accounts we manage.

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What advertising does to organic rank

“Paid sales lift organic rank” is the most common belief in Amazon advertising, and ours too. It has not been measured. Our hourly bid experiments could not detect it, so we give it no credit when we bid.

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Organic sales per dollar of ad sales

Comparing a store’s organic sales to its ad sales gives a ratio, not a causal effect: it says how big organic is next to paid, not how much of it the ads caused. It varies widely. Across the US stores we manage (90 days to Sep 7, 2026) the quartiles are 0.75, 1.04 and 1.81 dollars of organic sales per dollar of ad sales; on the two accounts measured most carefully it was 0.74 to 1.28.

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Not every ad sale is new

When a listing already ranks near the top organically, a shopper who clicks its ad would often have bought from the organic listing anyway. Nobody has measured how large that share is. Branded searches, where the brand nearly always ranks first, are the extreme case: see Demand and Markets.

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What we have measured