Brand protection Google ads campaign setup

Brand protection Google Ads campaign setup

Who this is for (and who it is not)

This is for a hotel or rental owner who already has people searching their name, but keeps losing those clicks to OTAs, resellers, or nearby competitors. You care about direct bookings, but you also care about control and clean reporting. You want a setup that behaves predictably, not a “smart” campaign that wanders off and spends on whatever Google finds interesting that week. If you’re okay paying commission even when the guest typed your exact brand name, this will feel unnecessary.

This is not for brand-new properties with no demand yet, or for owners who want Google Ads to “create” awareness from zero. It’s also not for situations where another agency has admin access and can change things anytime. If this feels uncomfortable, we are not for you.

The leak you’re paying for (even when you think you’re safe)

A guest hears about you, sees you on a map, gets a recommendation, or stayed before. They don’t search “hotel Halkidiki”. They search your exact name. That’s the highest-intent search you’ll ever get, and it should be the cheapest sale you make.

Instead, the search results show Booking.com, Expedia, a wholesaler page, or even a competitor using “your name” in their ad text. The guest clicks the first thing that looks official, and you just turned a direct booking into a commission booking. Worse, you often still pay, because the OTA got the click and the booking. Owners usually notice this only after a season, when direct doesn’t grow even though “everyone says they found us on Google”.

This isn’t theory. Google Ads auctions don’t care that it’s your brand. If someone bids on your name and you’re not present or you’re present in the wrong way, you lose. Google also happily matches your ads to searches that “look similar” unless you set boundaries, and that’s where budget quietly bleeds.

For reference on how auctions and ad rank work, Google explains the basics here… Understanding those two pages is enough to see why “we have a website so we’re safe” is not a plan.

What this setup solves in real operations

In real life, brand protection is not about “getting traffic”. It’s about stopping expensive, messy traffic from taking what you already earned. You already paid for your name through years of service, reviews, and reputation. When an OTA intercepts the brand search, it’s like paying rent for your own reception desk.

A proper brand protection campaign does three operational things:

• It makes sure the guest sees an official, clear option when they search your name, not a reseller pretending to be you.
• It reduces commission leakage by pushing brand-intent guests to a direct path, with fewer distractions.
• It produces cleaner data, so you can tell the difference between “brand demand” and “new demand”, instead of mixing them and lying to yourself with nice charts.

When this is done correctly, the owner feels it in fewer “I booked on Booking because I couldn’t find your site” stories. You also see it in your inbox. Enquiries become more specific, more “we want this room on these dates”, less “send info”.

What changes after it’s in place

The first change is visibility where it matters. When someone types your name, your ad shows with the right message, and it goes to a page that answers brand-intent questions fast. That sounds obvious. It’s not how most accounts behave.

The second change is control. Brand campaigns should be boring. Same keywords, same intent, same predictable spend pattern. When we see a “brand” campaign spending on generic searches like “best hotel Thessaloniki” or “spa resort”, we know the account is drifting. That drift is where owners get burned because it looks like marketing is working while money is going somewhere else.

The third change is proof you can actually use. Not “impressions”. Not “clicks”. Proof looks like clean search terms, fewer irrelevant matches, and enquiries or bookings that are clearly tied to brand intent. Google’s own explanation of search terms and why they matter is here… If your search terms report is a mess, your budget is a mess.

What’s included (plain terms, no mystery)

This is the part most owners ask for: “What exactly are you going to set up?” We keep it simple, because brand protection breaks when it gets clever.

• Brand keywords that match how guests actually search

  We build brand keyword coverage around your real name and important variants. We also include variants that guests use when they’re double-checking they found the right place. If your property has other language spelling variations, we account for that too, because Google doesn’t guess it the way you think it does. Nor it does understand that a hotel wit similar name exists in another country.

• Ad messages that fit brand search intent

  Brand search is not the time for generic sales talk. The guest already decided “this is the place”. They need confirmation: official site, correct location, direct contact, and the kind of reassurance that prevents them from clicking an OTA out of habit. We align the message to what a brand searcher is trying to do: visit your site, see rooms, check availability, call, or confirm directions.

• Clean landing pages that don’t waste the click

  The click should land on a page that behaves like an official front door. Not a slow homepage with a slider from 2016. Not a blog post. Not a page that hides the booking button under three banners. When the landing experience is clean, you pay less per click and you get fewer confused phone calls. Google openly ties landing experience to ad performance, and you can read their definition here: .

• Rules that stop budget leaking to irrelevant searches

  Brand campaigns fail when match types are too loose, when negatives are missing, and when the account is allowed to “learn” its way into generic traffic. We set boundaries so the campaign stays brand-only, and we monitor the search terms for drift. This is also where we protect you from accidental spending on informational searches that feel related but don’t convert, like people looking for jobs, reviews, complaints, or unrelated properties with similar names.

• Measurement that separates brand demand from everything else

  Brand protection should not be used to “prove” that Google Ads works in general. It should be measured as a defensive system: is it capturing brand-intent clicks cleanly, and are those clicks producing direct actions you care about. We set tracking so you can see brand-intent outcomes without mixing them into generic campaigns and calling it growth.

What it does not solve (on purpose)

Brand protection doesn’t fix a weak product. If guests click your official site and bounce because photos look wrong, policies are unclear, or the booking engine feels unsafe, ads won’t save it. You’ll just pay to learn that your funnel has holes.

It also doesn’t replace your OTA presence. Many small hotels in Greece still need OTAs for reach, especially in shoulder season. The goal here isn’t to “kill Booking”. The goal is to stop paying Booking when the guest was already looking for you by name. Those are different problems, and mixing them is how owners get sold the wrong thing.

It doesn’t solve reputation problems either. If your brand search results are full of bad reviews, forum threads, or outdated info, ads can’t erase that. They can only give the guest a clear official option. Wikipedia’s overview of search engine marketing is broad but useful if you want the context without agency noise.

When this is a bad fit

This is a bad fit if you don’t have meaningful brand searches yet. If nobody is searching your name, there’s nothing to protect, and you’ll be paying for a campaign that can’t do its job. It’s also a bad fit if your property name is extremely generic and overlaps with many unrelated terms, because then brand targeting requires extra care and sometimes you still get noise. We’ve seen this fail many times when owners insist on bidding on a “brand” that is basically a dictionary word.

It’s also a bad fit if you want the campaign to do two jobs at once: protect brand and also bring new cold traffic. That usually creates a messy account where you can’t tell what’s working. Owners get excited by volume, then disappointed when the bank account doesn’t match the dashboard.

Finally, it’s a bad fit if you can’t keep account access clean. If multiple parties can edit ads, keywords, or tracking, you won’t know why results changed. And you’ll end up blaming the wrong thing.

What “proof” looks like (and what it doesn’t)

Proof is not “we showed up more”. You can buy impressions all day. Proof is when the search terms are almost boring, because they’re mostly your name and close variants. When we open the report and see unrelated terms, we know the system is leaking.

Proof is also when brand-intent actions increase without you having to “push” people. That can be more direct booking engine starts, more calls, more WhatsApp clicks, more enquiry forms that mention your name. The exact action depends on how your business operates, but it should clearly come from brand intent, not from random browsing.

What proof doesn’t look like is inflated conversion numbers that come from counting everything twice. If someone clicks your brand ad, then later books through another channel, that’s not automatically “Google Ads success”. Clean measurement matters, otherwise you’re paying to feel good.

A small detail owners miss: brand campaigns can make other campaigns look worse, because they stop stealing credit. That’s healthy. If your generic campaign performance drops after brand is cleaned up, that’s not a crisis. It just means you’re finally separating “people who already wanted you” from “people you convinced”.

Common ways this breaks (so you can spot it early)

The most common break is letting Google broaden matching too far, especially if someone toggles settings without understanding the consequences. Suddenly your “brand” campaign is spending on competitor names, on generic location searches, or on informational terms like “reviews” and “complaints”. It feels like reach. It’s usually waste.

Another break is sending brand traffic to the wrong page. If the ad goes to a slow homepage, a language mismatch page, or a page with no clear booking path, you’ll still lose the guest. They’ll go back and click the OTA result because it feels faster. We’ve watched this happen in real time. The owner thinks “ads don’t work”, but it’s the landing experience that failed.

A third break is policy and naming confusion. Some properties have multiple names across OTAs, Google Business Profile, and the website. Guests search one variant, your ads cover another, and the auction is won by the OTA that happens to match the messy reality better. Cleaning that up is not glamorous, but it’s often the difference between control and chaos.

Boundaries (so expectations stay realistic)

We don’t do social media campaigns here. Brand protection is a search intent system, not content marketing. We also don’t “optimize” an account where other agencies or freelancers can edit settings, because you can’t run a controlled system in a shared kitchen.

We also won’t promise that OTAs stop bidding on your name. You don’t control their decisions. What you control is whether your official option is present, clear, and cost-effective when the guest searches. That’s the business decision.

If your goal is to reduce commission leakage and protect direct demand, this setup fits. If your goal is to dominate the whole market with broad keywords, that’s a different conversation and it should be separated from brand, otherwise you’ll never know what you’re paying for.

What we need from you to set this up properly

If you contact us, don’t send long explanations. Send the pieces that matter, and we’ll tell you quickly if this is worth doing in your case.

We’ll ask for:

• Your hotel or property name, plus any variants you’ve seen guests use (misspellings, Greeklish versions, shortened names).
• Links to your main OTA listings (Booking.com, Expedia, and any reseller pages you know about).
• What you currently see when you search your name in Google, and whether you think you’re losing clicks to OTAs or competitors. If you don’t know, say so. That’s common.

If you also have access to any past Google Ads data, great. If you don’t, we can still talk, but we’ll be stricter about what we can and can’t infer.

The decision in business terms

Brand protection is defensive spending that reduces unnecessary commission and confusion. It’s not exciting, but it’s one of the few Google Ads uses where the intent is clear and the operational outcome is easy to recognize. When it’s done right, it becomes part of your infrastructure, like signage and your phone line. When it’s done wrong, it becomes a quiet monthly leak you don’t notice until your margins tighten.

If you want this to be boring and stable, and you want to see clean brand search terms and brand-tied enquiries, contact us. If you want a system that “tries things” and changes every week, we’re not the right partner.

Not sure where to start? Contact our local team for friendly, personalised advice and to arrange a meeting in person.

No shortcuts. No noise. Data analysis. Use only what works.