Large drops in organic traffic are often misleading. Before panicking, segment the data to exclude traffic from non-target countries and non-commercial pages (e.g., careers, support). The actual impact on business-critical traffic is often negligible or non-existent.

When a customer hears about a brand from a podcast, ad, or friend, they often search for it on Google. Analytics then attributes the conversion to Google, but Google didn't create the demand; it was merely a navigational tool, leading to flawed marketing budget allocation.

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.

Agencies often present a blended PPC ROAS that includes high-performing branded search, inflating performance. Demand a separate ROAS for non-brand "prospecting" campaigns to understand the true, scalable return before increasing ad spend, as this reveals your actual cost of new customer acquisition.

After TV ads caused a massive spike in branded search volume, Jones Road ran an incrementality test. They discovered the paid search ads were not adding value; when turned off, nearly all traffic shifted to organic search, allowing them to cut the budget without losing customers.

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.

Rather than killing an underperforming paid search channel, cut its budget significantly and reclassify it as a "tertiary pipeline source." This frees up capital to invest in demand creation, which can improve the performance of your now smaller, more efficient paid search efforts.

Many B2B paid search campaigns fail not from low budget, but from a low Quality Score causing high "impression share lost to rank." This fundamental mismatch between keywords, ads, and landing pages throttles ad delivery, a problem that cannot be solved by simply increasing spend.

With soaring non-branded CPCs and the rise of zero-click search, running branded campaigns is increasingly vital. As users get information from AI summaries or social media and then search a brand directly, these campaigns become a highly efficient, low-cost way to capture high-intent traffic.