Lumping all search keywords together inflates performance, as branded search has a much lower effective CAC. People searching your brand name already know you from other channels. To accurately assess Google's performance and understand true customer acquisition, analyze the CAC for branded and non-branded keywords as distinct categories.

AI-powered search results create a confusing analytics signal. Marketers may see search impressions increase significantly while simultaneously witnessing a sharp decline in click-through rates and website traffic, as users get answers directly on the search page.

Brand campaigns reach the 95% of buyers not currently in-market. Instead of relying on vanity metrics, Square ties this investment to business outcomes by tracking the subsequent lift in organic traffic, which they've found converts better than paid channels.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is the fastest but most expensive way to generate leads, acting like a faucet you can turn on and off. The ideal strategy is to use it for immediate lead flow while simultaneously investing in brand building, which encourages customers to search for your company directly, lowering acquisition costs over time.

As Google and social platforms increasingly keep users on-platform, traditional traffic attribution is failing. Brand authority, built via trusted media, becomes the key signal for both AI models and human buyers, ensuring visibility where clicks have vanished.

Don't combine branded and non-branded search when calculating channel CAC. Branded search converts users who already know you from other efforts, making its CAC artificially low. Separating them is crucial to accurately assess how well your ads are acquiring truly new customers.

B2B paid search is becoming less efficient due to two converging factors. First, AI-driven zero-click searches are reducing overall click volume. Second, a surge of venture capital into tech is inflating costs per click (CPCs), making the channel much harder and more expensive to master.

As AI devalues simple clicks, marketing focus must shift to building a strong brand that algorithms recognize as authoritative. High-quality, well-structured owned content (like blogs and reports) becomes more critical for discoverability than traditional performance marketing tactics.

In competitive categories like insurance, generic keyword costs are prohibitive. Amica's CMO explains that a key goal of brand advertising is to make consumers "mentally available" so they search for the brand name directly. This makes branded search their most efficient acquisition channel, drastically lowering customer acquisition costs.