Try this right now. Open Google on your phone and search for your business name. Not your service, not your industry, your actual business name. Look at what shows up. If you see your own ad at the top, good. If you see a competitor's ad sitting above your organic listing, or if you don't see any ad at all and just your organic result with a bunch of other businesses around it, you have a problem that's costing you customers and you probably don't know it.
When someone searches for your business by name, they’ve already decided they want you. They might be looking for your phone number, trying to find your website, or checking your hours. These are the easiest conversions you’ll ever get because the person already knows who you are. If a competitor’s ad is showing up above your organic listing when that search happens, some percentage of those people are going to click on the competitor instead. Not because they wanted to, but because the competitor’s ad was the first thing they saw and they didn’t look closely enough to realize it wasn’t you.
This post is part of our 12-point Google Ads audit. The competitive landscape is step 11, and brand impression share is the single most important metric in it.
How Competitors Show Up for Your Name
Google allows any advertiser to bid on any keyword, including your business name. If a competitor wants to bid on "Smith Family Dental" as a keyword and show their ad when someone searches for Smith Family Dental, Google will let them. They can even use your name in their ad headline unless you’ve filed a trademark complaint with Google, and most businesses haven’t. So they can show up in the same search results, potentially with your name in their ad, and if you’re not running ads on your own name, they might be the only ad there.
A lot of business owners are surprised by this. They assume that because they rank #1 organically for their own name, they’re covered. But organic results appear below the ads. If a competitor is running an ad on your name and you’re not, their paid ad sits above your organic listing, and a meaningful number of people will click on the ad without scrolling down. This is especially true on mobile where one or two ads can fill the entire screen before your organic listing even appears.
What Brand Impression Share Tells You
Brand impression share is the percentage of searches for your business name where your ad actually showed up. If your brand impression share is 90%, your ad appeared in 9 out of 10 searches for your name. If it’s 30%, you’re missing 70% of the people who are specifically looking for you.
We audited a multi-location dental group where the brand campaign was running on Maximize Conversions with a 29% impression share. 71% of the time someone searched for this practice by name, they didn’t see an ad. Competitors like Aspen Dental and ClearChoice and a handful of local practices were all bidding on the name, and they were capturing those searches instead.
The business was spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on non-brand campaigns trying to get in front of new customers, while literally giving away the people who already knew their name because nobody had looked at the brand campaign settings.
On another account, an ecommerce business, the brand impression share was 10%. Ninety percent of the people who searched for this company by name were seeing competitor ads or no ad at all. The brand campaign had a $100/day budget that was running out by early afternoon, and the rest of the day was just open territory for anyone else bidding on the name.
The target for brand impression share is 90% or higher. Anything below that and you’re leaving searches on the table for competitors to pick up.
Why This Is Usually a One-Setting Fix
Brand campaigns are the cheapest traffic in your Google Ads account because you own your name. Google gives you a Quality Score of 8-10 on your own brand keywords because your ad and your landing page are the most relevant result for a search of your own business. That means your cost per click on brand terms is typically $0.50 to $2.00, a fraction of what non-brand keywords cost.
The problem we see over and over is that brand campaigns are set to the wrong bidding strategy. When a brand campaign is on Maximize Conversions or Target CPA, the algorithm is trying to get the most conversions for the budget. But brand searches are different from non-brand searches. You don’t need the algorithm to figure out who to show your ad to. You need your ad to show up every time someone searches for your name, and the bidding strategy that does that is Target Impression Share.
Target Impression Share lets you tell Google "I want my ad to show up 90% of the time someone searches for my name, at the top of the page, and I’m willing to pay up to $X per click." Since brand CPCs are so cheap, the budget to maintain 90%+ impression share on your own name is usually a small fraction of your total ad spend. We’ve taken brand campaigns from 29% impression share to 90%+ by changing one setting and making sure the daily budget wasn’t capping out before the end of the day.
What You Can Do About Competitors Using Your Name
If a competitor is bidding on your name as a keyword, you can’t stop them. Google’s policy allows keyword bidding on any term, including competitor names. What you can do is make sure you’re always showing up above them by running your own brand campaign on Target Impression Share with a reasonable budget.
If a competitor is using your trademarked business name in their actual ad headlines or descriptions, you can file a trademark complaint with Google. If Google upholds the complaint, they’ll restrict that specific advertiser from using your trademark in their ad text in the region you specified. The process takes about 2-4 weeks, and you’ll need your trademark registration number and examples of the infringing ad copy.
The trademark complaint stops them from saying your name in their ad, but it does not stop them from bidding on your name as a keyword and showing their ad when people search for you. The only real defense is your own brand campaign with high impression share. If you’re showing up first with a QS 8-10 ad at a $1 CPC, their QS 3-5 ad at a $4 CPC isn’t going to beat you in the auction very often, and they’ll eventually stop because the math doesn’t work for them.
How to Check Your Brand Impression Share
If you have a brand campaign, click into it and add the "Search impr. share" column if it’s not already there. That number tells you what percentage of brand searches you’re showing up for. If it’s below 90%, check the two "lost" columns. "Search lost IS (budget)" tells you how much you’re missing because your budget ran out, and "Search lost IS (rank)" tells you how much you’re missing because your ad rank wasn’t high enough.
If you’re losing most of your impression share to budget, increase the daily budget on the brand campaign. Brand clicks are cheap, so this usually doesn’t cost much. If you’re losing to rank, check your bidding strategy and make sure you’re on Target Impression Share, not Maximize Conversions. If you’re losing to both, fix the bid strategy first, then adjust the budget.
If you don't have a brand campaign at all, that's the first thing to fix. Set one up with your business name and common variations as exact match keywords, write an RSA with your business name pinned to headline 1, set the bidding to Target Impression Share at 90% top of page, and give it a reasonable daily budget. The whole thing takes about 30 minutes to set up and it protects you from every competitor who decides to bid on your name from that point forward.
Why This Is Worth Checking
If nobody has ever checked your brand impression share or told you what percentage of your own name searches are going to competitors, that’s worth looking into. It might be the cheapest fix in your entire account.
This is step 11 of our 12-point Google Ads audit process. If you want us to check yours, request a free audit.
