How some major brands waste millions on Google Ads

TL;DR* Many large brands spend heavily on Google Ads for their own brand terms even though they already rank first organically. In many cases, most of those clicks would have occurred through organic search anyway. By analysing the relationship between organic search and paid search, businesses can reduce wasted ad spend and reinvest it into acquiring new customers.

The hidden cost of brand keyword bidding

Many brands spend significant portions of their Google Ads budget bidding on their own brand name. This is especially common in large ecommerce businesses and established service companies. The logic is usually simple. If competitors or resellers bid on your brand, you must defend the position. In practice, this often leads to large amounts of unnecessary ad spend.

From audits we have run across multiple large brands, we have seen this problem repeatedly. In one case alone, a client reduced more than $1.5 million in brand ad spend over two years after analysing the relationship between paid search and organic search traffic. In most of those cases, the majority of brand clicks were already captured organically. In many situations, the brand already ranks in position one organically for its own name. The organic listing receives the majority of clicks even when ads are present. This creates a situation where businesses pay for traffic they would have received anyway.

Why this problem is so common

In theory, agencies claim they consider the relationship between organic search and paid search.

In reality, this rarely happens properly. Large organisations often separate their teams into:

• SEO teams managing organic search
• Paid media teams managing Google Ads
• Ecommerce or marketing teams overseeing revenue

These teams often operate independently. This means the blended search performance across organic and paid channels is rarely analysed properly. As a result, brand campaigns often continue running indefinitely because they produce strong ROAS metrics inside the Google Ads account. The problem is that this does not measure true incremental value.

Why ROAS alone can be misleading

Many agencies report performance based on ROAS within the Google Ads account. Brand campaigns typically show extremely high ROAS. This happens because:

• Users already know the brand
• They search for the brand directly
• They are already close to conversion

Those users would likely convert anyway. When agencies optimise based only on ROAS, brand campaigns appear extremely successful. However, this ignores a critical question. Would those conversions have happened through organic search anyway? If the answer is yes, then the paid ad spend is not generating new demand. It is simply replacing organic clicks with paid clicks.

The reseller and wholesaler problem

This problem becomes even more complicated for ecommerce brands. Many ecommerce brands sell products through:

• resellers
• distributors
• wholesale partners

These partners often run their own Google Ads campaigns. They bid on the brand name and drive up the cost per click on brand terms. The brand then competes against its own resellers in the ad auction. This creates a strange situation:

• The brand pays higher CPCs
• The reseller takes business from the brand who gets lower margins the DTC
• The brand competes for traffic that would have arrived organically

Over time, this inflates the cost of brand traffic significantly. We have seen this particularly often with ecommerce brands that sell through resellers or wholesale partners. Those partners bid aggressively on the brand name, which drives up CPCs. The brand then increases its own bids to maintain visibility and the cost of brand traffic rises even further. What often gets missed is that the brand already owns the organic listing for that search. In many cases, the organic result captures most of the clicks regardless of whether a paid ad is present.

Organic search already captures most brand demand

In most cases, users searching for a brand name are already far along the conversion path. They may have:

• previously visited the website
• seen advertising
• received a recommendation
• researched the brand already

This means the likelihood of them switching to a competitor when they search the brand name is usually very low. Most of those clicks will go to the organic listing. This is why understanding the relationship between SEO performance and Google Ads spend is critical. Strong SEO performance often means brand keyword ads provide very little incremental value.

The performance illusion inside brand campaigns

Brand campaigns almost always show the strongest performance inside Google Ads accounts. They typically produce the highest ROAS and lowest cost per conversion, which creates a powerful incentive to keep them running. For internal teams this makes performance dashboards look strong, and for agencies it makes results appear even stronger.

However, this raises an important question. Is the campaign actually generating new demand, or simply capturing demand that already exists? Brand campaigns often behave like a performance drug. They produce impressive results inside the platform, but those results may not represent true incremental growth for the business.

Agencies often argue brand campaigns must stay on to defend against competitors bidding on the brand name. While competitor bidding can be a legitimate concern, the risk of losing customers is frequently overstated. Users searching for a specific brand usually have very high intent and will still click the organic listing even if competitor ads appear. When optimisation focuses only on platform metrics such as ROAS or conversion volume, the incentive becomes protecting those metrics rather than questioning whether the spend is actually driving incremental growth.

The real metric that matters: incremental growth

The goal of paid media should not simply be high ROAS. The goal should be incremental growth. This means investing budget in areas that generate new demand rather than capturing existing demand. When we have tested reducing brand spend in real accounts, the results are often surprising. Organic traffic typically increases and total conversions remain stable while the paid spend drops significantly. In several cases this has unlocked substantial budget that could then be reinvested into acquiring new customers rather than paying for traffic the brand was already going to receive.

When brand spend is reduced, that budget can be redirected into:

• generic non brand search queries
• new customer acquisition campaigns
• new channels such as Meta Ads
• broader awareness campaigns

This creates a more balanced growth strategy.

Why most agencies do not solve this problem

Many agencies claim they analyse the relationship between organic search rankings and paid search performance. In reality, very few do this well.

Several tools have attempted to solve this problem by connecting:

• Google Ads data
• Google Search Console data

These tools try to determine when a brand ranks in position one organically and automatically pause brand ads. However, these systems are often unreliable. They rarely measure the true relationship between paid search traffic and organic traffic over time. This leads to inaccurate recommendations. As a result, millions of dollars in brand spend continue each year without proper analysis.

How Optimise Digital solves this with blended search analysis

Optimise Digital built an internal system that connects both:

• Google Search Console
• Google Ads

The system identifies:

• brand keywords with significant ad spend
• organic rankings for those keywords
• the share of traffic captured organically
• correlations between paid spend and organic traffic

The analysis looks at historical patterns. For example:

• When brand ad spend decreases, does organic traffic increase?
• Does total traffic remain stable?
• How much traffic is actually incremental from paid ads?

This allows the system to estimate:

• expected traffic loss if ads are paused
• traffic captured by organic search
• total cost savings

In many cases, the majority of traffic is captured by organic listings when brand ads are removed.

Automating the process at scale

This analysis is performed by OptiMate, the internal intelligence engine built by Optimise Digital. Once connected to both accounts, OptiMate evaluates brand keyword performance across the entire account.

The system calculates:

• historical brand spend
• organic ranking position
• expected incremental paid traffic
• estimated wasted ad spend

This analysis allows brands to understand:

• how much budget is currently being wasted
• how much could be saved each year
• how much additional growth could be achieved by reallocating the budget

The tool is available to clients and runs automatically once connected.

Where that saved budget should go

When unnecessary brand spend is removed, the freed budget can be redirected to areas that actually drive growth. These may include:

• non brand high intent search campaigns
• expansion into new keyword categories
• performance creative testing
• broader acquisition channels

This is where a structured Google Ads strategy becomes important. The goal shifts from defending brand clicks to capturing new customers.

Why blended search strategy matters

Blended search refers to analysing organic search and paid search together. Rather than viewing the channels separately, they are evaluated as one acquisition system. This approach helps businesses answer key questions:

• Are we paying for traffic we would have received anyway?
• Which keywords require paid visibility?
• Where should paid spend focus to maximise incremental growth?

Without blended search analysis, these questions remain unanswered.

Final perspective

Brand bidding is not always wrong. There are situations where it makes sense, particularly when strong competitors are aggressively targeting brand terms or when the organic listing is weak. However, many brands spend far more than necessary because the interaction between organic search rankings and paid search campaigns is not properly analysed.

Looking only at paid search performance inside Google Ads does not tell the full story. To understand the real impact of advertising spend, businesses need to evaluate how paid search, organic search, email, social media, PR, and other channels work together to drive conversions.

When these channels are analysed together, a clearer picture of true incremental growth emerges. This is where broader measurement approaches such as marketing mix modelling become valuable. Rather than attributing success to a single platform, these models analyse how multiple marketing channels collectively contribute to business growth over time.

When businesses step back and evaluate the full system, the question changes. Instead of asking whether a brand campaign produces a strong ROAS, the question becomes whether that spend is the best use of budget compared with other growth opportunities. Understanding the relationship between SEO, organic search, paid search, and the wider marketing ecosystem allows businesses to eliminate wasted spend and reinvest budget into channels that genuinely expand demand.