Stop Over-Paying For Brand Traffic

Hey, it’s Myles from Serendipityy.

Something that could be eating into your ad budget without you even noticing is brand traffic in your cold/prospecting campaigns.

This is a common problem in Google Ads, and fixing it could save you money and make scaling easier.

What’s going on?

When you run Google Ads campaigns like shopping or search to find new customers, Google might show your ads for brand searches like “[your brand name] + [product].”

That’s because Google doesn’t know that your brand name is the name of your business.

It just sees a high-converting keyword, and so targets people who are searching for this.

Why this matters:

• You’ll pay higher CPCs for brand traffic that you could get cheaper in a dedicated brand campaign.

• You won’t know the real return from cold traffic versus brand traffic.

• When you scale, you’ll be paying for both brand and cold traffic, meaning you’re paying double for some visitors.

Example: Imagine half the traffic in your shopping campaign is warm and half is cold. If your CPC is $1, your cost per new visitor is $2. So that campaign is twice as expensive as you think for generating new customers.

How To Fix This:

Check your campaigns for brand terms:

For PMax campaigns: Go to the insights tab, scroll to search term insights, and check over a 30/60-day period for brand terms triggering your ads.

For shopping or search campaigns: Look at the search terms report for the same date range length. Use filters like “search term contains” or sort by impressions to spot brand searches.

Exclude brand terms:

Go to Tools > Shared Library > Exclusion Lists and create a negative keyword list of brand terms, including typos.

If your brand was Hello Fresh, you’d do this.

1. Hello Fresh (Broad)

2. “Hello fresh” (Phrase)

3. [hellofresh] (exact)

4. [helofresh]

Broad match works slightly differently for negative keywords than it does when you’re targeting keywords. So don’t worry about excluding relevant searches when using broad match for negatives.

For PMax campaigns:

Create the negative keyword list and then submit it to your PMax campaign using Google’s implementation form.

By doing this, you’ll stop over-paying for traffic and get a clear view of what your cold campaigns are really doing.

I hope this email was useful.

Talk soon,

Myles

PS - If you run an e-commerce brand over $30k/month and want a free Google Ads strategy consultation, book a call here