Brand Activator explained

• How does it work?
• What you can expect
• Savings
• Activity Log
• Settings
• FAQ

How does it work?

Brand Activator monitors and adjusts specific Lone Ranger keywords within your Google Ads campaigns according to market conditions. A Lone Ranger refers to an advertiser who exclusively displays text ads and occupies the top organic result. Google Shopping ads (PLA) are not considered. Examples:  

Lone Ranger

1. Only Text Ad (top 1 or bottom 1) and Organic 1.
2. No advertisers and always Organic 1.

Not a Lone Ranger

1. You're not advertising but someone else is.
2. You're not always Organic 1.
3. Any other option.

Once every hour, the system automatically evaluates these keywords to determine their Lone Ranger status. If necessary, appropriate actions such as pausing or restarting them are taken by adding or removing them from a negative keyword list using a Google script in your Google Ads account .

What you can expect

• Google changes their broad match and close variant algorithm often. While the identification of Lone Rangers (top of organic and only paid advertiser) is straightforward, the savings calculations can be skewed by these frequent Google changes.
• A small amount of click loss may occur. This is expected when turning off paid ads. There is no guarantee that 100% of those clicks will be captured by organic listings.
  • Brand Activator will monitor and report on click volume across both paid and organic, so that you can monitor overall performance both when your campaigns are spending and not spending.
  • Brand Activator uses your Search Console data to monitor the performance of your organic traffic.
  • Additionally, conversion rates for organic traffic will not have same conversion rates as paid clicks. Organic traffic is often sent to non-optimized conversion pages.
  • Important: Revenue targets will be tracked closely with your Customer Success representative. This will ensure that revenue is not impacted from click loss.

Savings

The top of the chart provides a high level overview of the following:

• All time saving - How much you have saved since Brand Activator was activated in your account.
• Savings - Your savings during the selected period. The currency for savings is determined by you before we activate the feature.
• Top competitor - Who was your top competitor during the selected period.
• Most time in negative list - Which term spent the most time in negative list during the selected period.
• Least time in negative list - Which term spent the least time in negative list during the selected period.

The Savings trend chart shows your total savings for the selected period. Clicking on a data point opens a chart label which shows daily, weekly or monthly savings for that specific period.

How are savings calculated?

Basic calculation

• We use data from the past 28 days to calculate today's savings.
• Hourly spend is estimated from daily spend using Google Ad groups.
• Each day, we review hourly spend and estimate hourly savings.
• The Exact Match term and Close Variant estimated savings utilize the same methodology.
• Savings across multiple keyword match types are calculated by analyzing search term-level spend, then aggregating the spend for the same search term across the three match types (Exact, Phrase, and Broad).

Savings calibration

To accurately calculate savings, we need spend data for each hour of the day on at least one day within the past 28 days. If we don't have enough hours of spending to reliably calculate savings, we may temporarily resume spending during the missing hour/s on one day to establish a new spending baseline.

The Number of ads and organic clicks chart provides insights into the impact on organic clicks by displaying both the number of ad clicks and organic clicks. This is useful if you want to analyze the revenue, conversions, and clicks you received without running paid ads. Additionally, you can also see the potential lost revenue, conversions, and clicks that could have been generated if you had advertised. Note this does not track the impact of whitelisted domains on paid and organic click traffic.

To utilize this feature you must link Search Console and Google Ads Accounts.

The bottom table lists:

• Keywords - Your Brand Activator keywords.
• Savings - Total savings during the selected period.
• In NL - What percentage of time the keyword was in the negative list during the selected period.
• Top competitor - Who was your main competitor during the selected period.
• Competitors - Total number of competitors during the selected period. Clicking on the hyperlink will list the competitors and show you how long we saw the competitor advertising.

Note a Google limitation means there is a 72 hours delay data from Google, so the latest available savings data is always from 4 days ago. For this reason, we disabled the last 4 days' date picker.

Currency

You can select the currency in which you want to view your savings, regardless of the currency used in your Google Ads account. For example, a user based in the UK might see savings displayed in Euros on the Savings page, while Search Term Details are shown in GBP. To change your savings currency, please email support@adthena.com.

Search volume threshold

Activity Log

Once a keyword is paused or restarted, information is captured in the activity log and is limited to last 60 days.

Search term - Shows hourly logs.

Event

• Added to NL (BA Google Negative Keyword List).
• Removed from NL.
• No change.

Reason & Details

• Lone Ranger: Your website is top of organic and is the only advertiser displaying a paid ad.
• Lone Ranger + whitelisted: No competitor ads were seen. We'll show the whitelisted domain in 'Details'.
• Lone Ranger + No text ads found: Organic listings only. No text ads were seen for you and your competitors. 
• Competitors are bidding: We'll show advertising competitors in 'Details'.
• Not enough data: We didn't have enough data to assess your competitive landscape.
• Not top organic position: A competitor currently sits at the top of the organic search results.
• Savings calibration.
• Low search volume: To avoid influencing search results, we only consider terms with a minimum monthly search volume of 2,000 based on most available data in Google Keyword Planner.

Date - Date and time a search term was added or removed from negative keyword list based on Adthena's data.

The logs are not populated instantly; there is approximately a 2 hour delay between the time when the script ran and the time the logs appear in-app. 

Example: Regardless of what minute the script ran at 10:xx, Adthena's program runs at 11:30 to gather the data for 9-10. When program runs at 11:30, it will look at 9-10 data, when program runs at 12:30, it will look at 10-11 data, etc.

Settings

Search Terms

Important! Before adding or removing terms, please review How do I switch out Brand Activator search terms?

In 'Settings' you can view your existing Brand Activator search terms and make changes. For most customers, our Customer Experience team has already added your search terms to kickstart the indexing process promptly. If you need to make some changes, either add individual terms or bulk upload using a CSV file. For the latter, upload search terms in a single column CSV file (in UTF-8 format). Please only include one search term per row and do not include any headers. For example, you can upload:

• search engine marketing
• ppc
• paid search

but not:

• paid search, search ads, ppc
• [sem]
• +sem
• 'search engine marketing'
• "paid search"

As well as brand terms, the following terms are also supported:

• Generic terms.
• Broad match and phrase match.
• Misspellings.

Close variants

Brand Activator uses close variants of every keyword. We show close variants for the 30 last days only. If there are many close variants, we show 100 with the most traffic. Read more on close variants on Google Ads Help.

Need more terms?

To expand your limit, please reach out to your Customer team to acquire additional search terms. Note the list is capped at 50 search terms.

Whitelisted domains

Whitelisted domains will not be considered when identifying a Lone Ranger. For example, you may whitelist other domains you own, or your affiliate's domains. If we see both your domain and a whitelisted domain being the only adverts above your or whitelisted domain organic listing, then we will turn off your domain adverts automatically. Because we only pause your domain adverts, not your whitelisted domain(s), Brand Activator may increase traffic to your whitelisted domain(s).

SERP activity

• a.com = customer
• b.com = whitelisted

Example 1

1.  a.com [paid] - Lone Ranger
2.  b.com [paid] 
3.  a.com [organic] 

Example 2

1. a.com [paid] - Lone Ranger
2. b.com [paid] 
3. b.com [organic]