If you can imagine behavior there are people out there who exhibit it.

I've received email and calls from people thinking they're contacting a different company/organization they searched for when they actually clicked on my ad.

If search results for your KW's have no ads, you may want to re-think the niche you're targeting.

If you worry about competing against advertisers you'll never get anywhere.

> If you can imagine behavior there are people out there who exhibit it.

Very true. I've heard the same thing from others who say they skip over the ads. I can't understand however why if an ad appears to be relevant to your search and promising to solve your problem why you wouldn't click it.

Of course ads will affect your traffic. It's more links competing with yours. Doesn't matter if it's organic or paid. What you have to do is be more attractive than them. You may even want to compete with those paid ads. You'd get more real estate on the results page.

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Yes a good question when there is a whole column of ads on the right and three or so at the top. The main issue here is that even if you are ranked three organically you can be almost below the fold on the screen and so get looked over.

Something else to think about is that it is said that if you run a google ad AND your site is organically listed in the top three, the fact that they are there together can boost being clicked by 40% over just the effect of either your organic listing or google ad would have for clicks.

This might sound like an ad for google adwords, and i personally dont use them, but they are said to have great synergy effects ...