It’s not uncommon for merchants to dismiss brand advertising. The typical reason is that they expect their website to come up in organic search and so will get those clicks anyway. That perspective ignores some other factors at play, and we’ll get into that. Pausing brand keywords is not something we normally recommend, so we don’t often get to dig into real numbers about the impact. When a client insists on doing it, we get a chance to test some theories again and see if Google has changed. In this post we’ll share what happened with an ad account that decided to pause their own brand terms and quantify how that impacted the business.
Background & Our Predictions
An executive in this business had some skepticism about the value of advertising on their own brand keywords and directed that all ads being triggered by brand terms be stopped. In this case, we paused all brand advertising and set up negative keywords around brand terms and gave it a month. We then went back to review performance from a few weeks before that shift compared to a few weeks after. It’s a great natural experiment.
What we would predict from past experience is that organic CTR would go up as some of the potential organic results that were being cannibalized by ads went back up. But we would also predict that total clicks would go down, because when ads and organic listings both appear on a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), that page doesn’t show a competitor ad and jointly the ad plus the organic listing will get more clicks than either one by itself. Now, a competitor would be expected to take some of those clicks.
We would also predict that total revenue would go down, because competitor ads would now show up at the top of some of those SERP pages and siphon off some of those results, particularly for searches with clear purchase intent that competitors would be more likely to bid on. Obviously, the cost on brand keywords would also go down to zero, so there would be some cost savings. But given past experience, we would predict that revenue would go down by far more than that, and that the gross profit margins on those lost sales would far exceed the ad spending, driving down total business profitability after accounting for those ad cost savings.
What Happened When We Blocked Brand Terms?
Trying to get accurate data on this is a bit more difficult when we turn off terms entirely rather than keeping them on but shifting spend to lower levels. Some reporting in Google Ads is not available on keywords we no longer advertise on—in particular the Paid & Organic report that tells us what happens with organic results for keywords we advertise on. So, we could not compare all of the data in Google Ads from before and after about what happens on SERPs that displayed both paid and organic listings. We just know what it was before. If we had been able to simply reduce those bids but keep the keyword advertised we would have been able to show some more nuanced information.
Data From Google Analytics 4
As should be obvious, the spending on paid keywords went down to zero. Google Analytics 4 shows the pattern we expected to see. Revenue and traffic attributed to Google Ads went down. Revenue and traffic attributed to Google organic went up.
But the increase in organic traffic and revenue did not match the scale of the decrease in Google Ads traffic and revenue. In this case the total ads+organic revenue reported in GA4 went down by approximately 50% from the weeks before the change to the weeks after the change. In other words, half of the revenue this website was getting from brand keywords was lost due to this change and is now going to competitors.
If this was a simple case of “we’re going to get that revenue anyway so we shouldn’t spend money on brand terms” we would expect to see no change in ads+organic revenue from before to after a shift like this. Given the margins involved and the fact that the cost savings here were less than 3% of that lost revenue, this appears to have dropped profitability rather dramatically.
Data From Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another good source of data to check for how organic traffic shifted. Comparing the four weeks before the change to the four weeks after, organic CTR on keywords containing brand terms doubled. The actual number of clicks increased by about 100% on these terms organically. But in the four weeks prior, Google Ads was delivering a lot more clicks than that. Previously about 8 ad clicks were being received for every 1 organic click. So, for every 9 clicks that were previously received on brand terms, now only 2 clicks were being received after this change. About 75% of total clicks on brand keywords were lost to competitors.
Additionally, Google Search Console reported a drop in organic positions of about 10% after the change and a slight drop in total organic impressions. This is interesting and a bit counterintuitive, but we have seen it before. While Google says that ads have no impact on organic results, that is not entirely true.
Google does not factor advertising into organic results. But they do factor in other things around user behavior, CTR, etc. When you have a limited number of ads and organic listings on a SERP, your ad kicks out one more competitor who would otherwise be getting some clicks and additional ranking. When you have ads+organic results on a page, you get higher CTR between the two of them, and the effect of that on user behavior appears to boost search rankings on your organic listings in most cases. It’s not the spending on ads that boost your organic rankings. It’s the effect of the change in user behavior from having ads on the SERP.
Other Theoretical Impacts
There are some other subtle factors that also impact the performance of ads after turning off brand keywords. With modern AI bidding strategies, the system is constantly learning from the conversions that are coming in. Turning off brand keywords results in less training data about some of your best customers. It’s hard to do a proper test of what the real impact of this is. But we absolutely know that more conversion data results in better training in systems like these, and more ability to find additional conversions that are similar to your past conversions. Reducing the level of conversion data coming into an account is going to have an impact on that AI training. And if and when you decide to turn those ads back on, it’s going to take the AI that much longer to get up to speed. Meanwhile, you’ve given your competitors a leg up.
The Bottom Line
In this natural experiment, turning off ads on brand keywords was a total financial failure. Impressions on brand terms went down, organic positions went down, total clicks went down, and because of that, total revenue also went down. In this case, and in nearly every other case we’ve ever analyzed, turning off brand keyword ads was not a great financial tradeoff. On top of that, it was not good for SEO. This is why our recommendation is generally to advertise on your brand terms, even though that means you’ll be paying for some traffic you would get anyway. You’re still getting a lot of additional traffic that would otherwise go to your competitors.
The bottom line is that paying for a few clicks that used to be free will result in getting a boost in additional business which more than pays for itself. Advertising on brand keywords is nearly always a profitable strategy.