If your product is already on the end-cap at the supermarket, would you also pay to have it next to the cash register? Probably not. But most brands do exactly that in digital and don't even realize it.

In the previous article — the organic thermometer — we explained why your weighted organic position is the best vital sign for your retail media. But we also mentioned its traps. The main one is this: if you only look at your organic position, you don't see where you're paying for clicks you already had for free.

To see it, you need a second data point on top of the first: your sponsored share-of-voice — how much of the paid space for each keyword you're buying. And you need to look at them together. In this article we explain why, and what the matrix that crosses both looks like.

The simple matrix: organic × paid

Imagine a table with one row per important keyword for your brand. For each keyword, two columns:

That's the matrix. Sounds trivial. But few teams look at it as a unified table — most have "the rank dashboard" in one tab and "the Amazon Ads dashboard" or "Mercado Libre Ads dashboard" in another, and never cross them.

Now let's color the matrix into zones. Picture a simple chart:

Four quadrants emerge naturally. Each one means something different — and two of them require immediate action.

The upper-left red zone: brand cannibalization

The upper-left quadrant (high paid SOV + high organic position) is the most commonly ignored problematic zone. Here you're being the first organic result AND buying the paid spaces above it. Your sponsored ad literally appears next to your own organic listing that was already going to receive the click.

Why does this happen? Inertia. Sponsored spend is planned around "obvious" keywords — the category name, the star product name — and almost never questioned for whether you're already dominating organically. The agency activates the keyword "anti-dandruff shampoo" because it's the obvious high-volume word, without asking "are we already at position 1 there?".

The most famous experiment on this problem was run by Blake, Nosko, and Tadelis at eBay in 2015 (published in Econometrica). They paused their paid brand ads and measured what happened to total traffic. The conclusion was stark: "brand keyword ads have no measurable short-term benefits" and the overwhelming majority of the clicks they were buying would have converted organically anyway. They were paying millions for traffic they already had.

How do you confirm this is happening to you? The crude way is to read the matrix: any keyword where you have organic position 1-3 AND buy 30%+ of paid SOV is a candidate. The rigorous way is an experiment — turn off spend on those keywords for 2-4 weeks and see if organic traffic captures the demand. It's a cheap, fast experiment, and almost always returns money.

Important: we're not saying "turn off all your brand spend." There are legitimate reasons to keep some keywords paid even when you dominate organically — defending against competitors who bid on your name, controlling the creative message, securing visibility on mobile where the first paid row dominates the screen. But the default should be to justify them, not assume them.

The zone where you DO need to fight: visible defensive spend

The middle-bottom quadrant (decent organic deteriorating + low paid SOV) is the zone where the thermometer alone isn't enough to diagnose well.

Imagine this scenario: you've spent three quarters with your product at organic position 4 for an important keyword. This week it dropped to 7. Next week to 9. The following quarter, position 12. Looking only at the thermometer, the conclusion would be "we're losing, we need to invest more." But in what? Why?

The answer is usually in the matrix: if you look at competitors' sponsored SOV on that same keyword and see that competitor X went from 8% to 22% over six weeks, you already know what happened. You're being out-spent there. The competitor is feeding their product's virtuous circle (paid clicks → conversions → ranker → organic position), and that's pushing you down.

This completely changes the decision. Without the matrix, you might conclude "our product is losing relevance, we need to change the content or lower the price." With the matrix, you see it's a specific spend war and the right decision is to match or slightly exceed the competitor's paid SOV on those key keywords for the time needed to recover organic position.

The difference between the two reads is the difference between months of misdirected initiatives and a focused bid adjustment in 4-6 weeks.

The competitor that went from 8% to 22%: how to diagnose it

Let's make this diagnostic explicit because it's one of the most common moves in competitive categories. An important keyword:

Week Your organic position Your paid SOV Competitor X SOV
Week 1425%8%
Week 4525%14%
Week 8725%19%
Week 12925%22%

Without the competitor SOV column, you see a position drop and start suspecting launches, content, price, reviews. With the column, the pattern is obvious: they're buying position from you.

The right action isn't "investigate every possible cause." The right action is:

If position recovers, the diagnosis was correct and the additional spend is defensible. If it doesn't recover, something else was happening besides the SOV war — and the next article (on multivariate attribution) helps you untangle it.

The point: without the matrix, this diagnostic is invisible. And many brands spend quarters investing in the wrong things because they diagnosed wrong.

The conversation with your agency that this view makes possible

There's a specific conversation that most brand managers can't have with their agencies today, and that the matrix unlocks.

Usual conversation (without the matrix):

— Brand manager: "ROAS this quarter was 4.2. Is that good?"
— Agency: "It's within benchmark."
— Brand manager: "OK."

Possible conversation (with the matrix):

— Brand manager: "I see that on the keywords where we already have organic position 1-3, we're still buying 30%+ of SOV. Why don't we turn those off and reallocate the budget to keywords where we're at position 8-15 and Company X is out-spending us?"
— Agency: "Good observation. There are three legitimate reasons we keep those (mobile dominance, brand defense, creative control), but it's true the amount is over-sized. We can reduce 40% on those and move that budget to…"
— Brand manager: "Let's do it. But I want to see the thermometer in 6 weeks."

The difference is enormous. Without the matrix, the brand manager doesn't have the technical language to question the allocation. With the matrix, the conversation moves from "how much did my spend return?" (can't be answered well) to "are we allocating the budget where it most moves position?" (can be answered).

And the agency, far from feeling questioned, generally appreciates the conversation. Good agencies want brand managers who think this way — it makes them better customers, retained longer, with growing budgets. Mediocre agencies get uncomfortable, but that's also valuable information.

What ePerfectStore monitors to show the matrix

Building the matrix requires capturing two data flows in parallel and joining them by keyword/SKU:

For the organic side: organic position of your SKUs (and competitors') across the curated keyword universe. That's what the thermometer does.

For the paid side: how many sponsored slots each brand occupies on each keyword, week by week. That's scraping of carousels and sponsored blocks, identifying which SKU/brand appears in which paid position.

Crossing both gives the full matrix: for each important keyword, your organic rank, your paid SOV, the paid SOV of your top 3-5 competitors. It's exactly the view you need to have the conversation from the previous section.

Doing this at every retailer (Mercado Libre, Amazon, Éxito, Jumbo, Olímpica) and every country in the region is what lets you see SOV wars before they show up in your organic thermometer — because paid SOV moves weeks before organic position.

In summary

Quadrant Diagnosis Action
High organic + high SOV Possible brand cannibalization Pause experiment; justify or reallocate
High organic + low SOV Healthy organic defense Hold; watch for competitor moves
Mid organic + competitor SOV climbing Defensive spend needed Match or exceed competitor SOV for 6-8 weeks
Low organic + low SOV Category without presence Strategic decision: invest or divest

The organic × paid matrix isn't just another metric. It's the framing change that makes the organic thermometer operational. Without it, you'll mis-diagnose position drops and pay for traffic you already had. With it, your team and your agency speak the same language, and budget decisions are based on where the war is moving, not on ROAS benchmarks that compare apples to oranges.

In the next article in the series we go one level deeper: how to separate the effect of your spend from the effect of the other variables that also move organic position — price, promo, content score, reviews, competitor actions. It's the multivariate attribution layer, the detective of your measurement system.

Sources

Want to see your organic × paid matrix per keyword across every retailer? ePerfectStore.com crosses both signals week by week on Mercado Libre, Amazon, Éxito, and more.

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