How Branded Search Can Destroy Your Business

Is your competitor stealing your branded traffic and your revenue? 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy reveals a real Google Ads audit where a rival hijacked branded search, crushed impression share, and wiped out thousands in sales. 

You’ll learn how brand bidding, auction insights, impression share loss, and weak brand protection can quietly destroy performance, even when Meta and non-brand campaigns look fine.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Google Ads Unleash guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday and today I am warning you, you need to protect your brand. We have spoken about this topic very very often. Right? So in the past I've done multiple pods on how to uh properly set up a brand campaign. Right, a brand search, how to properly split brand and non-brand with uh Pmax and Shopping hacks for brand search, right? What ideal bid strategy to choose for instance or what ideal settings to choose or for instance also um what ideal sort of um landing pages you can make, right? But I've also talked about how incremental it is that very often it might make no sense to actually bid on brand whatsoever. For instance, if you're flogging a lot of volume on nonbrand anyway and there's no one else bidding on your branded name. But today, I want to share a lesson with you from an audit that I actually carried out last night. So, a client came to us in the how should I say food niche. Basically, they make a very specific type of breakfast set. which is um um all I can reveal at this stage. And they've got one big competitor who do exactly the same product. And they've come to me at the beginning of February and have lamented that their Google Ads performance seems to have gone down massively, but their spend has actually gone up and overall they are behind last year's revenue in total in January versus the previous year. What I'm mind doing a paid audit to have a look at what is going on. So, I did and I want to share this audit with you because there's a very expensive lesson in there. I know I've done an audit pod the other day, but I think this is something like I've never quite seen before in that extent and it shows that you can never ever have one rule for everything in Google, right? Like never run brand search or always brand search and so on. There's always nuances and it also shows how interconnected channels are. Let's dive right in. So, basically, when this client came to us, they actually were looking at some wild and dire figures. Okay. So, what I'm going to try and do in parallel is that I'm going to try and get all of the triple whale data up at the same time to sort of show you a little bit or to sort of try and paint a visual picture of where they are year on year. So overall they were about 20% down year on year in revenue. Okay. Their meta ad spend was actually a little less year on year as well. Although rorowass efficiency seemed to have gone a little bit up. So if we actually look now at last month versus previous year. Let's have a look at the data whilst it's loading. We can see yes their sales were about down 20% year on year and their total ad spend had gone down about 13%. Also their overall rorowass was a tiny bit worse 5% and what really stood out to me is that their encumber costs went up quite a bit and their conversion rate had tanked by about 20%. Although they had the same number of sessions and typically actually better data uh with app everything else. So they had a better cost uh per to uh they seem to have had um uh longer session durations etc etc. So what's going on here? So the first thing that I've then looked at is the sort of yearon-year numbers in terms of um the channels and there I saw that met ads had actually um spent a little bit less on here. Okay, so I had then a look at uh the numbers. We're talking a total of sorry the data is loading. It's not always that fast triple whale. I'm afraid they spent about 20% less year on year on meta ads but with a uh much better efficiency on platform. To me this suggested the following. Um on platform the suggest um uh the the Ross figures actually gone down on Triple Well up that they probably throttled the spend a little bit on meta year on year because they just didn't see overall um figures improve as much as uh as as they would have hoped. Thus, they had didn't really end up spending on meta ads so much given that their overall conversion rate is lower as well. To me, this suggests that there is something overarchingly wrong with how people closed the deal especially if the art toart cost per art to cardart has actually gone down. So people weren't really were interested but they didn't actually pull the trigger. Conversely I saw that Google ad spend was up 25% yearon year but rorowass had tanked by 60% um uh up to 70% on platform even and purchases had only gone down by 55% suggesting that um probably a lot of branded traffic must have taken a hit. The reason I'm thinking this is because Roas had it dropped disproportionately to the number of purchases. That's always a very good indicator that very likely there's something wrong with the brand traffic because it that typically yields the highest rorowass. So if rorowass tanks significantly but the same number of purchases doesn't tank linearly then very likely there's something up with the brand traffic. They have more spend year on year though which is very surprising. So uh To me that suggests they probably shifted more of the spend towards Google ads but forgot about brand completely. So I then dove in to what is actually going on. First of all I had a look at their keyword planner and had a look is actually search volume changed for the product. For instance, is there more or less demand for the product that they sell year and year? And as it turns out there actually been a drop of 15% in non-branded search demand year on year for the products that they offer. Okay, which is very surprising to me because that suggests it was maybe not a very good idea to try and lean too much into the non-brand side of Google and shift more budget towards there. But I'm also seeing in the ad account that more spend went to a couple of new products that they had and that they tried a lot of demand gen which is fair enough and which has actually worked pretty decent as well. Okay. Then I had a look at the branded traffic. Uh because what my hypothesis was is maybe the branded traffic is affected because they've spent less on meta ads go. There's fewer people searching for brand erggo. That's why we're seeing fewer purchases on Google and a lot lower rowass and that suggests that um they falsely maybe looked for the reason within Google ads. Um but then um that actually met ads is to blame that there's such a performance drop on Google year on year. Okay. So then I had a look into the um into that and the branded traffic actually stayed relatively stable if not improved year and year even since November it had been higher than November 24 and higher in November uh in December 24 and also when I look at the brand search which year on year has been basically unchanged uh and I'm now mean the search campaign I could actually see that impressions had stayed the same or had gone up slightly as well suggesting that clearly there's quite a lot of brand awareness and uh that the volume of the brand traffic is not as much as an issue as we thought although it is not in line with what we're seeing. So bit of a contrarian thing but brand awareness can be obviously not always correlating onetoone with the meta ad spend but can be um you know uh supported of course by other activities or by just general awareness um that carries throughout the months and the activity throughout the year. So then I had a look at the conversion tracking because the usually I always try to go um like this. I always look at the sort of the overall volumes and then in the next step see if there's a technical issue for instance uh has something tanked in merchant center which there hasn't has something gone wrong in conversion tracking for instance with a lot of analyses that we do we see worse data year on year. But then actually we look at last year's data and see a repeat rate in the conversions in in purchases of two or whatever and we can see actually last year the data was completely duplicated which of course um absolutely distorts um the figures year and year and paints a wrong picture. Okay. But we also seen tripawware that it's gone down. So I really just double check that that that is the issue because otherwise we would have seen uh a different uh story in Triple Whale. Okay, like for instance, same data in triple whale but only in the ad account it fluctuated massively. All right, so everything was fine there. Like I said, everything was fine with the feed. Some smaller things could be fixed. Some smaller other things could be fixed. Then I had a look at what the campaigns did year on year and I had a look at what where the spend went and exactly the same picture emerged which I had suspected more spend went into branded non-branded traffic and a few more sales generated. It was all looking okay, but overall we had about um 3,200 fewer um sales year on year. And then I had a look at where we lost those and it hit me like a brick. All of those sales were lost in branded traffic in search brand and in shopping brand. Absolutely all of them. All right. From those 3,200 3,500 roughly 3,000 were lost in branded search and 500 were lost in branded shopping. So I had a first look into brand shopping at whether there was maybe some sort of issue with the brand and nons brand split not being correct. That was not the case. Then I had a look at the branded search to see was there maybe an issue um sort of versus last year. Did that uh play out differently. Uh but it was the same structure last year as well. So there was no kind of difference. Which got me then thinking to look at um some of the metrics that may suggest that something is up with competition here. Okay. So impressions roughly stayed the same. Costs have gone down significantly because we generated a lot fewer clicks, 80% fewer clicks yearon year on brand, which is absolutely insane. aign. Okay. Um, then maybe I'll actually filter down on just them two campaigns so I can consolidate the metrics here which may be an interesting insight for all of you. So overall we generated 70 80% fewer clicks, right? And we spent overall only 20% less in total costs. Okay, that is an alarm bell to me. How can we have just that little less spend with the same um uh sort of number of impressions? year and year. Uh but so much less in um in so much fewer clicks. Okay. Then I looked at the clickthrough rate and that had tanked by 66% year and year on branded traffic and I thought to myself, hm, whe there's something clearly is in the bush with how it's playing out and what uh competitors are likely doing. So this suggests to me um volume is there, but we're not showing enough and we're not winning enough clicks either due to competition or wrong bits. strategy. CPCs however had gone up by 270% yearonear as well. Um and then I'd seen that we had tanked by 80% in sales. Uh conversion rate had gone down hugely 20%. And overall I then looked at some very interesting metrics and these were first of all the search impression share which on normal branded search remained interestingly very relative stable but tanked massively in shopping. But now comes the most important part, search imp absolute top impression share and search top impression share that had tanked by 80%. So although we did show, we didn't show in the top positions anymore and we had actually lost most of the impression share um due to uh uh worse ad rank which didn't exist last year. There was basically 0% on both search loss, impression share and ad rank and budget and we had lost 75% in the click share. So all of this suggested there's something up with competition. So then I looked at the auction sites for search last year um and for shopping last year versus this year and I identified one competitor who was absolutely blasting the auction year on year um compared to the previous year. Bear in mind guys, we would have noticed this very likely quite quickly. Uh but I'm doing a an audit now after the fact. So, it's unfortunately a little bit uh a little too late, but that's why it's always pays to have a good Google Ads manager because that's the whole thing that they look at. And then I actually just simulated an uh an auction in the country where this uh where this client resides and it hit me like an absolute brick. We were seeing that competitor using my client's branded search name appearing above our own branded ads. So, what had happened is is that they were using our client's branded search, which is not allowed by the way. You can't use that in the headlines, in the descriptions, etc., especially as it's trademarked, to trick the quality score into um uh showing it. And they even had the cheek of saying our client's name alternative, right? They were sending it to their offer page, which I then had a quick look at, and there it hit me like brick as well is that they were not only a tiny bit cheaper, only €1 cheaper, but here comes the kicker. Because of this food that you buy, um you have to pick flavors. Um their offer bundle was actually uh a choice of 10 smaller uh packets of this of various flavors that you could test as a discovery packet. Whereas with our client, you had to commit to two big tubs of this of this food. um and you could only pick two flavors. So, objectively their offer was actually better. Also, their PDP was slightly better, etc. And it turns out that we overall we probably lost about 150,000 uh uh euros in turnover, maybe even a little bit more in January uh because the brand surge didn't properly protect um um against this this competitor and more or less they were feeding in on the brand awareness uh that our client enjoys and they were also feeding off the meta ads of our clients because traditionally the meta ads were always hoovered up by uh Google branded searches which didn't happen anymore which also explains how all of this correlated. So meta ads was spending generating brand awareness that puffed into nothingness explaining the lower conversion rate and also the hesitance um of people buying a uh certain product or offer where another competitor jumped onto this branded search and offered a better alternative now. How do you fix this? You have to first of all fight back uh increase the CPCs and just bite the bullet. Uh when it comes to that right, you would probably have to uh mop up get, you know, do an overhaul on the ad copy as well. Potentially make a better offer page, but Something that we suggested to the client as well is to um certainly activate a lawyer, right? There is absolutely nothing that you can do um uh now in terms of fighting back and just using their keywords or something that would be silly. But um we have screenshots of the competitor wrongly using the branded search name, which is not allowed. Um and I'm pretty sure that a good lawyer could even um try and subpoena a um an ad account and get the information and we could kind of prove that this has actually mopped up a ton and ton of uh um sales which shouldn't have happened before. Okay, a few more tips were to probably up the bits what I said maybe even switch a bit strategy to target impression share to either absolute top or top um with a higher bid. Um also um uh put the branded search on a better offer rather than just the um homepage. Also I suggested that you they consolidate their ad account structure because since they left us a year and a half ago, they went a bit haywire and uh aren't letting Google do the heavy lifting. Also, they had a few other things which were probably uh things that you could improve pretty easily like um making sure that the audiences that they've uploaded the first party data to the Google Ads account uh works better. Couple other things with the feed, etc., etc. But um overall, this is just a super super interesting case study that shows it always depends. It really I know I ate the sentence, but it generally always depends. Um there is something to be said about branded search not always being incremental, but that's why you always test that. And in doubt, you'd rather always defend your own branded searches and not leave it to others if especially you seen a competitor being this aggressive. Okay. Some advanced strategies potentially would be to create advertorial pages as well against your competitors which is completely legal um to fight back a little bit there because that's the best way to get them back to a certain degree. And if you want to find out how to how to do this and if you know this this story resonated if you need any help need a view in your attic country do actually do do one uh uh one off audits as well to have a check of your current situation, right? Um if if you want to book that, just message me at jeremyanddigital.marketing. You can also find me at Jeremy on Google Ads uh on LinkedIn and um you can also um yeah, book a one-to-one call with me via the website youngdigital.marketing. Little PSA, we're actually currently looking for a new growth manager, SCA growth manager. to join the team. So if you want to join a you must be UK based. There is absolutely no way you can uh um unfortunately join if you're from abroad. You have to be UK based. But if you are UK based, if you are um interested in joining a young and dynamic, vibrant team that manages um uh really interesting Google Ads accounts um and grows um British and European brands, then you're at the right space. Drop me a message. This has been Jeremy Young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.