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Google Charging More for Brand than Cold KWs under Guise of Hidden ‘Search Terms’
So I recently audited for a company in UAE. They had traffic all mixed up in one campaign so I recommended they segment it into different campaigns, it was the right thing as they were paying unnecessarily high for brand traffic. The implementation was left to the in-house manager who has some knowledge of Google Ads but is not an expert (all broad match, no negatives, no headline pinning in brand ads etc).
I still have read-only access so I checked things out after two weeks and found it perplexing that their cold KWs campaign is getting like 5 AED CPC while their brand KWs with 10/10 Quality Score is getting 8-9 AED.
So I dived into the search terms and interestingly found a “xxxx xxxx xxxx” brand KW all in broad match getting most of the 9-10 AED CPC while their phrase match or exact brand searches are getting the more reasonable 2-3 AED. But the crazy thing is that in search term reports the majority of the expensive searches are hidden so I have no idea if its the broad match attracting random searches or competitors (competitor campaign btw is separate & has lower CPCs than Brand btw) or their own brand terms getting such high CPCs.
Now I know just using phrase match or exact and adding a bunch of negatives will prevent these random high cost searches & only target brand searches but their manager is not following through with the recommendations I provided but still its highly sus of Google to put majority of budget towards those broad KWs and charge so high for them and still not show the search terms so they have no idea what is costing them so much.
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1 Reply
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It seems every week I hear more creative ways that Google manipulates brand searches to increase their revenue at advertisers expenses. Very sus indeed.
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