Why Are You Paying for Your Own Name?
Type your brand name into Google. There’s a good chance the first thing you see is an ad. Yours, or a competitor’s.
So why are you paying for clicks from people who were already looking for you?
The industry answer is two words: brand defense. Almost every agency recommends it. Almost nobody puts a price on it.
I wrote about branded campaigns back in 2023, and my view hasn’t changed: most brand search spend pays for sales you would get anyway. But there is one real exception, and that exception is where brand defense lives.
This article explains where brand defense came from, what the research actually proves, why your dashboard can’t measure it, and the one number that tells you whether it’s making or losing you money.
How Your Name Ended Up in an Auction
Brand defense isn’t a law of nature. It’s the result of a policy change.
Before 2004, if a competitor bought your trademark as a keyword in the US, you could complain and Google would block it. In 2004 Google changed the rule for the US and Canada. Anyone could now bid on any keyword, trademark or not. Competitors still couldn’t put your name in their ad text, but they could show up whenever someone searched for it.
The UK and Ireland followed in 2008. Most of Europe followed in 2010, after the European Court of Justice ruled that Google wasn’t infringing trademarks by letting advertisers bid on them. When the UK rule changed, one agency reported that prices on some brand terms jumped as much as 500% in the short term.
So did Google make up brand defense? I can’t find proof that Google coined the phrase. It didn’t need to. It created the need.
Picture a landlord who rents the space in front of your shop door to whoever pays most, including your competitor. You can bid for it too. You can call that defense. It’s still rent.
What the Research Actually Proves
Two well-known experiments asked the same question and got opposite answers.
In the first, eBay stopped buying ads on its own name. 99.5% of the traffic came back through the free organic link. The ads were close to worthless.
In the second, Edmunds, the car research site, switched off its brand ads in half of its US markets for four months in 2015. Only about half of that traffic came back through organic. In the markets where brand search mattered most, only 28% came back.
Same test. Opposite answer. The Edmunds researchers point to the likely reason: competitors were bidding on “Edmunds.” When Edmunds stepped out, they stepped in. eBay, on the other hand, had nobody seriously competing on its name.
That’s the whole story of brand defense in two experiments. Your ad is worth almost nothing when no one else is in the auction. It can be worth a lot when someone is.
The largest study on this, covering thousands of brands on Bing, says the same thing. With no competitors on the page, a brand’s own ad added only 1–4% more clicks, and bigger brands gained even less. When competitors were bidding and the brand wasn’t, they took 18–42% of its clicks. When the brand was there too, they took only 1–5%.
The same study found that adding your ad moves nearly half of your organic clicks to the paid ad. You start paying for clicks you used to get for free.
What about Google’s own research? Its 2011 headline said 89% of search ad clicks are incremental. That covers all keywords, most of which an advertiser doesn’t rank for organically. Google’s 2012 follow-up looked only at clicks where the advertiser already ranks first organically, which is almost always true on your own name. There, only 50% of ad clicks were incremental.
Even by Google’s own numbers, half of your brand clicks would have come anyway.
And how did advertisers react to the eBay result? A later study found that only 11% of brands with no competitors on their name stopped buying brand ads after it was published. Nearly nine in ten kept paying.
One honest caveat. Most of these experiments ran around 2015, and several used Bing. Search pages have changed since, with more ads, Shopping and AI answers. The studies show the direction. Your own account shows the size, and I’ll show you how to measure it below.
Why Your Dashboard Can’t See It
Brand search is the best-looking campaign in almost every account. Highest conversion rate. Highest ROAS. Lowest CPC.
Of course it is. These people typed your name. Many of them were on your site yesterday.
Conversion rate answers one question: do people who click my brand ad buy? It never answers the question that matters: would they have bought anyway?
Here’s the part almost nobody knows. When a competitor shows up on your name, your conversion rate won’t warn you.
Another large Bing study found that 20–47% of people who click a competitor’s ad on a brand search come straight back to the search page within 30 seconds. On the brand’s own link, it’s 7%. And when a brand’s ad drops out of the top spot, competitors take 6–15% of its traffic, compared with 1–2% when it’s there.
The shoppers competitors take are your least committed ones. Your loyal customers scroll past and click you anyway. So the visitors you keep convert as well as ever, while your total sales quietly shrink.
A healthy conversion rate can hide a shrinking business.
Brand ROAS has the same blind spot. A 20x return on brand search tells you how loyal your customers are. It tells you nothing about what the ad did.
What Brand Search Takes From Everyone Else
Brand search takes from two places.
First, it takes from your organic results. Every paid click that would have landed on your free listing is a cost with no return. When no one is attacking, the research says that’s most of them.
Second, it takes credit. Nobody searches for a brand they’ve never heard of. The search happened because of a TikTok video, a Meta ad, a PR mention or a friend. Brand search stands at the door when the customer arrives and collects the credit for a trip someone else paid for.
That’s why moving budget from Meta into “efficient” brand search so often backfires. You feed the collector and starve whatever was bringing people to the door.
Brand search doesn’t create demand. It catches it.
The Model: What Brand Defense Is Worth
Brand defense is insurance, and insurance has a price. Here’s how to work out the most you should pay for it.
You need six numbers: how many people search your name and click something each month, the share of those clicks competitors would take without your ad, the share they still take with it, your conversion rate, your margin per order (not revenue), and how many brand clicks you pay for.
Put them together:
Break-even CPC = Brand clicks × (Steal rate without − Steal rate with) × Conversion rate × Margin per order ÷ Paid brand clicks
Pay less than that per click and defense makes money. Pay more and you’re losing money guarding your own name.
Now the part most people miss. Brand defense isn’t one auction. It’s two: the hours when someone is attacking, and the hours when no one is. Price them separately.
Here’s a simple example. Say 10,000 people a month search your name and click something. When a competitor is on the page, they would take 20% of those clicks without your ad and 3% with it. So your ad saves 1,700 clicks. At a 5% conversion rate and a $40 margin, that’s 85 orders worth $3,400. You pay for 6,000 brand clicks, so your break-even is $3,400 ÷ 6,000, about 57 cents.
Now take the hours when no competitor shows up. Your ad only adds about 2% more clicks, so 200 clicks, 10 orders and $400. Same 6,000 paid clicks. Your break-even is about 7 cents.
With no one attacking, a 10-cent brand click still loses money. Cheap is not the same as profitable.
The attacked number needs one more adjustment. Not every stolen click is a lost sale. Remember the 20–47% who bounce straight back to the search page. Say a third of the stolen shoppers would have come back and bought from you anyway. Protected orders drop from 85 to about 57, and your break-even drops from 57 cents to about 38 cents.
Two things push your real CPC toward that line. A competitor bidding on you raises it. A sale or a thinner margin shrinks what each protected order is worth. Peak season often does both at once.
So set your maximum brand CPC at break-even. Use the attacked number where and when competitors show up, and the unattacked number everywhere else. If the auction wants more than the protection is worth, let it go. That isn’t giving up your name. That’s refusing to overpay for it.
Price each type of brand search on its own, too. Your bare name, your name plus a product, and your name plus words like “discount” or “review” attract very different levels of attack.
How to Get Your Real Numbers Without Switching Anything Off
The research gives you ranges. Your own account gives you the real numbers, and you don’t need to pause a single ad to find them.
Who is attacking. Auction Insights on your brand campaign shows which competitors appear on your name and how often. Check it by market and by day of the week. Attacks are rarely constant.
Your brand capture rate. For each day: (paid brand clicks + organic brand clicks) ÷ brand searches. Paid clicks come from Google Ads, organic clicks and searches from Search Console, and the paid & organic report puts them side by side (text ads only, not Shopping). This tells you what share of the people searching for you actually reach you.
Your steal rate. Compare your capture rate on days competitors show up often with days they don’t. The gap is your real steal rate. It replaces the 20% in the example.
Your cannibalization. Watch paid and organic brand clicks together. If paid goes up and organic goes down by about the same amount, the extra spend bought clicks you already had.
Your partners. Look closely at who the attackers are. Sometimes it’s your own affiliates or resellers, bidding on your name to earn a commission on customers you already had.
If a competitor never leaves, you won’t get a clean comparison. Start with the research range and narrow it as patterns show up.
The Bottom Line
Brand defense is real, but only when someone is attacking. When no one is, your brand ad mostly buys clicks your free listing would have caught.
So stop judging brand search by its conversion rate and ROAS. Price it like insurance. Work out your break-even CPC, price attacked and unattacked auctions separately, use margin instead of revenue, and track your brand capture rate. And give the credit for every brand search to whatever made people search in the first place.
Brand defense is real. Paying any price for it isn’t.
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