The Brand Defense Moat

The play

1. Audit the leak

   Search your brand, brand + “promo code”, and your five most distinctive property names. Screenshot every ad that isn’t yours. That’s the moat you’re about to dig — and the evidence for why.

2. Build one tight brand campaign

   Exact and phrase match on your brand and its misspellings, plus distinctive property names. Separate ad groups for brand vs. property names so the ad copy can match. Nothing else goes in this campaign.

3. Write ads that close, not introduce

   Brand searchers already chose you — the ad’s job is to seal the direct booking: “Book Direct & Save — No Service Fees”, best-rate messaging, flexible-cancellation sitelinks, phone extension. Send property-name searches to the property page, not the homepage.

4. Cap the cost

   Brand clicks should be cheap. Start with manual or capped bidding; brand campaigns rarely need automation’s help. If CPCs climb, it means someone’s bidding against you harder — which is exactly when the moat matters most.

5. Add the protective negatives everywhere else

   Add your brand terms as negatives to every non-brand campaign so brand traffic can’t inflate other campaigns’ performance and muddy the data.

6. Report it honestly

   Label the campaign clearly and report brand and non-brand separately, always. Brand ROAS is real money defended, but blending it into the account average is how agencies flatter themselves.

7. Answer the “we’d get that traffic anyway” objection with commission math

   When an owner or CFO questions paying for brand clicks, reframe it: take the booking revenue your ads captured, multiply by the 15.5% commission those bookings would have paid if they’d drifted to an OTA instead, and set that against your actual ad spend. Framed as avoided commission, a branded campaign stops looking like a toll and starts looking like the cheapest insurance in the company — we’ve watched brand campaigns return revenue at 60:1 against spend.

What to expect