You hate paying for clicks on your own brand name. Meanwhile, a competitor is perfectly happy to pay for the chance to intercept them.
I noticed it in the search results before I saw it in the reports. Our client’s brand, in bold, inside a competitor’s ad.
Same oil and gas software space. Same pricing. But the name doing the work in that ad belonged to a business that had been building trust since 1986.
The account had a $10,000 budget and a $10 CPC ceiling. Nobody was excited about using that budget to buy branded clicks. The client already owned the name. Why pay again?
Fair objection. Wrong moment to leave the search results undefended.
The objection made sense. The search results changed it.
Paying for your own name feels different from paying to reach someone new. You have already done the work that made a buyer remember the business. A branded click can feel like a charge for collecting demand you earned elsewhere.
That is the argument against a brand campaign. It deserves to be taken seriously, especially when the account has a hard spending constraint.
But it was not the only thing happening here. A direct competitor had put that name inside its own ad. We were not debating branded search in an empty auction. We were looking at someone else using the client’s recognition to make their offer more familiar.
The decision changed from whether branded traffic should be free to whether refusing to pay was leaving a useful opening for a rival.
Owning the brand did not mean owning everything a buyer saw after searching for it. That was the problem we needed to solve.
One week. Two different jobs.
We did two things in the same week: helped the client file a complaint with Google about the trademark in the competitor’s ad text, and launched a tightly controlled brand protection Search campaign.
The complaint addressed the use of the name. The campaign addressed the space on the results page. One was not a substitute for the other.
That distinction matters under Google’s trademark policy. Google can restrict a direct competitor’s use of a trademark in an ad after reviewing a complaint. It does not restrict trademarks simply being used as keywords. Complaints concern specific advertisers and the countries and industries where the owner can demonstrate trademark rights.
So a complaint is not a request to reserve every auction for the brand owner. It is a challenge to a particular use of the trademark.
We did not make the protection campaign depend on a complaint decision. The campaign had its own job: put the client’s message back into the paid search space while the trademark issue followed its separate process.
$10 was a ceiling. Not a target.
The $10,000 was the account budget, not a blank cheque for brand defence. The $10 CPC cap was a constraint, not a recommendation to spend $10 on every branded click.
That is where protection can go wrong. A competitor appears, the account owner gets angry, and suddenly holding a position matters more than what that position costs.
Our response was a controlled brand campaign, not an open-ended bidding war.
For a campaign like this, I want the scope to stay explicit: which branded searches are worth protecting, what spending room exists, and which conversion actions will justify keeping the campaign live. The objective is to protect a buying path, not to win an argument with another advertiser.
I also want brand performance reported separately from non-brand acquisition. Otherwise, efficient branded traffic can make the whole account look stronger without explaining whether we are getting better at reaching new buyers.
A cap creates discipline. It does not remove the need to check what you bought.
The campaign earned its place. The reporting still needed limits.
The brand campaign took back space on the results page and produced some of the most efficient primary conversions in the account. That gave us a practical reason to keep it, beyond simply disliking the competitor’s ad.
It also made those searches more contested for the rival. That can put pressure on the economics of competing for the same attention. But without the rival’s account data, a higher competitor CPC is an inference, not a measured result. It is not the number I would use to justify our spend.
The useful evidence was on our side: the visibility we regained, the budget we used, and the conversions the campaign recorded.
Even there, I would not confuse a primary conversion with a closed sale. In Google Ads, primary conversion actions are selected actions used in reporting and, when their standard goal is selected, bidding. Their commercial value depends on what the account is actually counting.
Nor does a strong branded conversion rate prove that every conversion was additional. Some buyers may have reached the client organically. Keep that question open instead of turning an efficient campaign into an inflated growth claim.
Brand protection needs a review rule, not a permanent excuse.
After this, we stopped treating branded search as a nice-to-have whenever a competitor was actively using the client’s name. It became part of the response we expected to make.
That is not permission to leave the campaign untouched forever. Mandatory attention does not mean unlimited spend.
My review starts with the actual search result. Is the competitor still there? Are they using the trademark in the ad, or appearing for the search without it? Those are different problems, and only one is the complaint described here.
Then I look at our campaign. What are we paying? What is being counted as a conversion? Is there evidence of useful buyer activity, or are we defending a position because we have become attached to it?
Finally, I look at the trade-off. Money allocated to defence cannot do another job in the account. The campaign needs to justify its place against that constraint, not only against the irritation of seeing a rival.
If competitive pressure changes, revisit the scope and spend. Keep the reason for the campaign visible. Do not let the label “brand protection” become its entire business case.
Protect the demand you already earned.
This was not a story about a bigger budget. It was a story about refusing to let an understandable objection block a necessary response.
The client did not want to pay for their own name. I understood that. But the competitor was already willing to pay for a chance to stand between that name and the buyer.
A trademark complaint and a brand campaign gave us two separate ways to respond. We challenged the ad text and defended the search space, with the CPC ceiling still part of the decision.
My rule now: when a direct competitor starts using your name to capture branded searches, brand protection is a default response, not an optional afterthought. The budget still needs limits. The results still need scrutiny.
You can hate paying for your own name. Just do not confuse refusing to pay with protecting it.
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