Brand protection is growth protection in an AI Search world by Adthena

The search landscape is changing. With the rapid evolution of AI, the Google SERP is no longer a predictable grid of 10 blue links. 

This shift presents new opportunities for businesses, but it also creates new risks for your brand. Competitors, affiliates, and bad actors can now use sophisticated tactics to hijack your presence, mislead customers, and drain your budget.

Your brand’s visibility is never fully secure, and these hidden threats don’t just waste money – they suppress your growth and limit your ability to acquire new customers. 

Protecting your brand isn’t a defensive chore; it’s a proactive strategy for unlocking budget and fueling your growth.

Below are three critical ROI pitfalls that could be silently draining your paid search performance, with a focus on how they are essential for navigating this new reality.

Pitfall #1: Fraudulent affiliate hijacking your ads

(Hurts whether you run brand ads or not)

Ad hijacking is a deceptive practice in which a third party, typically a fraudulent affiliate, impersonates your brand to intercept traffic and revenue. This is a form of paid search fraud that exploits the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model. Hijackers bid on your brand terms, creating ads that closely mimic your own. 

Their primary motivation is simple: profit without effort. 

By leveraging your established brand trust and using deceptive methods to evade detection, they can steal revenue by claiming commissions on sales you would have acquired anyway and inflate your CPCs by driving up competition in the ad auction for your brand terms.

How ad hijacking works

• Impersonation: Hijackers create ads that mimic your brand, using your name and identical or similar ad copy.
• Traffic interception: Their fraudulent ad appears in search results, tricking users into clicking on it. 
• Deceptive redirects: The user is sent to your site via a redirect that embeds the hijacker’s affiliate ID.
• Stolen commissions: The hijacker claims a commission from your affiliate network for a sale you would have gotten anyway through PPC, essentially stealing revenue.

Why it matters

Ad hijacking has tangible financial and reputational consequences. Fraudulent affiliates can:

• Steal PPC revenue and inflate costs. Every commission paid to a hijacker is revenue that should have been yours, and the inflated CPCs directly impact your budget.
• Harm brand reputation. The hijacker controls the ad copy and landing page, and misleading messaging can damage customer trust.
• Distort performance data. Your analytics may show conversions coming from an affiliate channel when they were actually the result of a direct search for your brand.

How to tell if your brand has fallen victim to ad hijacking

• Drops in brand traffic or PPC conversions
• Unexpected spikes in affiliate payouts
• Unfamiliar ads appearing in Google’s Transparency Center
• Seeing your brand ads appear on brand keywords in the SERP, even though you aren’t bidding on them

What you can do manually

You can check Google’s Ad Transparency Center for rogue advertisers impersonating your brand, but it’s time-consuming, doesn’t guarantee full capture, and doesn’t show affiliate IDs for action.

How to fix it with AI-powered Ad Hijacking Detection 

Rather than manually searching for hijackers, an automated solution such as Adthena’s Ad Hijacking Detection powered by Impersonally, can continuously protect your brand and free up your team.

• Reclaim lost revenue and cut costs: Automatically detecting complex fraud in real time lets you stop paying out commissions to hijackers and reduces the inflated CPCs they cause. This directly recovers lost PPC revenue and affiliate budget.
• Save time and scale protection: With continuous, AI-powered monitoring, you can identify and take action against hijackers across all your affiliate networks without manual effort. This frees your team to focus on strategic growth initiatives instead of constant monitoring and enforcement.

Success in action: Go City reduced CPCs by 75% & caught 89,000 brand infringements

• Challenge: Go City’s affiliate program lacked automated brand keyword monitoring, leading to partners hijacking ads. This inflated costs and resulted in unearned commissions.
• Solution: Using Adthena’s Ad Hijacking Detection, Go City monitored affiliates, flagged infringements, and communicated with non-compliant partners, pausing commissions as needed.
• Impact: Ad hijacking was reduced by 86% in the first month, thereby reclaiming thousands in affiliate commissions.

Pitfall #2: Paying for clicks you shouldn’t be

While running brand campaigns is essential for protecting your visibility, many marketers waste a significant portion of their budget by overpaying for clicks they would have received anyway. The core challenge is knowing when to stop bidding and when to hold back.

You need to defend your brand against competitors, but you also want to avoid paying a premium when there’s no one else in the auction. This hidden leak drains your budget without delivering any real, incremental value.

How to tell you’re impacted

• Auction insights showing competitors bidding on your brand terms
• Rising or high brand CPCs
• Brand campaigns consistently consuming budget without incremental gains

What you can do manually

If you don’t run brand ads, monitor the SERP to ensure competitors aren’t bidding on your brand terms. If you do, monitor auction insights and run incrementality tests on brand bidding. This is labor-intensive, with limited ability to maximize savings, but it’s a good starting point

How to fix it with AI-powered brand bidding

An automated solution such as Adthena’s Brand Activator can help you manage brand campaigns more efficiently, freeing up budget and time.

• Intelligent bidding: Brand Activator automatically pauses bids when you’re already visible at the top of organic search and no competitor is present. It reactivates your bids the moment a competitor enters the auction, ensuring your brand is always protected when it needs to be. If you’d like to keep paid ads always on, you can still use Brand Activator to lower your bids when no competitors are present and save on brand protection.
• Maximize budget efficiency: By preventing you from overpaying for clicks, Brand Activator generates savings that can be reinvested into new campaigns to drive genuine growth.
• Continuous, data-driven protection: The solution provides 24/7 monitoring and reporting, giving you a clear view of your budget savings and allowing you to confidently manage your brand spend.

Success in action: Kia grew market share by 61%

• Challenge: Havas and Kia needed to find a more strategic and efficient way to reallocate their paid search budget to maintain market position amid rising competition in the electric vehicle category.
• Solution: They partnered with Adthena to use its Brand Activator for brand protection and to reduce wasted spend, and its Market Share data to identify high-growth categories and guide budget reinvestment into a new tiered, value-based bidding model.
• Impact: This new strategy led to a 61% year-over-year increase in market share, a 60% increase in test drives, and a savings of £286,000 by cutting brand campaign costs.

Pitfall #3: Falling victim to trademark infringements

Competitors using your trademark illegally mislead users, inflate CPCs, and steal conversions. Even if you don’t bid on brand ads, your competitors might – and misuse your trademark while doing so.

How to tell you’re impacted

• Auction insights showing brand bidding – could indicate trademark infringements, although it’s not a guarantee
• Manual SERP checks or Google Transparency Center monitoring (time-consuming, limited sample)

What you can do manually

You can submit evidence to Google manually. Although the process is slow and repetitive and relies on finding evidence on the SERP, it can be a good starting point to combat infringements.

How to fix it with AI-powered trademark auto takedown

Rather than manually searching and submitting trademark violations, an automated solution such as Adthena’s Infringement Tracker and Auto Takedown can protect your brand around the clock.

• Save time and manual effort: Instantly detect and report trademark infringements to Google with one click. This frees your team from the slow, repetitive task of manual monitoring and documentation.
• Protect your brand and your budget: Automatically reporting unauthorized ads not only safeguards your brand reputation from misleading messaging but also prevents them from inflating your CPCs.

Success in action: Princess Cruises saved £16K in brand spend

• Challenge: Princess Cruises needed to reduce the CPC of their paid search brand campaigns, which were being driven up by aggressive competitor bidding.
• Solution: Adthena provided competitive intelligence, allowing Princess Cruises to monitor brand terms, identify competitor infringements, and create bidding rules to lower their CPC.
• Impact: The use of Adthena resulted in a 69% reduction in brand CPCs and enabled Princess Cruises to invest savings into new, high-performing keywords, which led to a significant increase in website visits.

Brand Protection is growth protection

Protecting your brand in PPC isn’t defensive housekeeping. It’s about unlocking budget for growth. Every dollar saved by plugging these leaks can be reinvested to:

• Acquire new customers.
• Boost revenue growth.
• Reclaim time for strategic initiatives.

Even if you don’t run brand ads, competitors and affiliates can exploit your brand terms, confuse customers, and suppress growth. These hidden leaks don’t just waste your budget; they directly reduce the funds you could be allocating to new customer acquisition and scaling your campaigns.

Audit your brand campaigns (or your brand presence if you don’t run ads) and you might discover hidden losses that, once fixed, could fund your next growth initiative.

Ready to turn brand protection into business growth with a multi-award-winning AI solution? 

Get a complimentary brand audit and see where your budget is leaking.