What is the real impact of Google’s new paid search ad layout on organic search?

It would be the same as what happened with Facebook (when it reduced its organic reach).

Soon it would be a pay-to-play model with Google, most companies don't want to invest time and resource on SEO & Content marketing. They would see this as a great opportunity to get in front of audiences. Companies with the big pockets would really hit the bottom-line of smaller players.

Lets assume that you have a high ranking page for Shoes & you are hoping to get organic visits. Then you notice it has been reducing the past couple of months.

This is because, there are e-commerce image ads, normal search ads, followed by related images & google knowledge graph. So in total the first7 slots would be ads & related information and your page would rank8th.

Not much CTR on the8th position to be honest.

Thank you for asking.

I think the impact is visible on mobile phone where organic search result will tend to appear below the fold, i.e. result will be pushed down the page where user will need to scroll to see the ad.

Now with SERP I trust it is now important for marketers to observe the fragmented customer journey (if you haven’t read the Mc Kinsey customer journey model I encourage highly to do it) and to build content that is relevant to the step customer is in throughout the journey that is: trigger to attention caused by an ad or any event, search for information, brand consideration, comparing and making decision to purchasing.

These steps are content sensitive. A customer searching for information has not arrived at the purchasing-decision step so it will be irrelevant to display a paid ad at that moment. Now when user has made decisions his intent is clear and this time, as per the query made, a paid ad could help in turning user into a customer.

So the impact the way I see it would be for marketers to differentiate queries as per the customer journey steps and feed relevant landing page, hence relying on a mix of paid and organic results that respond to the user micro-moment. I hope this could help.