How to work out what others' ads on your brand cost youHow to work out what others' ads on your brand cost you

Yourbrand's finance director asks the affiliate manager a fair question: the ads on “yourbrand discount code” that aren't ours, what do they actually cost us? She has screenshots, a brand page showing another advertiser in four of every ten checks, and a network report full of sales. What she doesn't have is a sum anyone else can follow.

This guide builds that sum one line at a time, from numbers you can find in your own reports, and says where each one comes from. It also marks the part no report can give you: how many of those orders would have reached you anyway. The Brand bidding cost calculator does the same arithmetic in your browser and shows every line's sum.

Two bills, not one

The first bill is commission. If the ad is a partner's, and a shopper clicks it and buys, the sale can be credited to that partner under last click rules, even though the shopper typed your name. The second is your own price. Your actual CPC is the least you need to hold your place above the ad ranked below yours, so a new bidder close behind you can raise what you pay for a click without ever showing above you.

The two don't always come together. A competitor or a reseller on your name earns no commission, so only the price applies. A partner your terms allow on your name may cost commission you agreed to pay. Working the sum out tells you how much is at stake, which is what decides whether a question is worth asking.

The commission sum, line by line

Six numbers, multiplied in order. Each line works from the one before, rounded the way you'd write it down, so anyone can check it on a calculator.

• Searches a month for your name with “discount code”, “voucher code” and “promo code”. These are the searches where code pages and partners most often advertise, and the ones a brand campaign on exact match may not enter. The guide to “brand + discount code” searches covers why they're worth counting apart from the bare name.
• The share with others' ads: of those searches, how many showed another advertiser's ad. One search from your desk is one place, one device and one moment, so this needs a count over many checks at different hours.
• The share of clicks those ads take, on the searches where they showed. The section below covers what the studies found.
• Conversion rate: orders per visit from those clicks. Google Ads defines its own conversion rate as conversions per ad interaction, and the idea is the same.
• Average order value, in pounds. GA4 calls its version Average purchase revenue; the glossary has the detail.
• Commission rate: what your programme pays those partners, as a percentage of the order.

Twelve months of that is £167.04. The click share here is the lower of the two study figures below, the one for a brand whose own ad holds the top place. With 12%, the figure for a brand with no ad of its own on those searches, the same month comes to 17.3 orders and £83.04 of commission, or £996.48 a year. The click share moves the answer more than anything else in the sum, so it's the number most worth replacing with your own.

Where each number comes from

• Searches. In Keyword Planner, choose Get search volume and forecasts, paste in “yourbrand discount code”, “yourbrand voucher code” and “yourbrand promo code”, and add up Avg. monthly searches. Google counts each keyword with its close variants and rounds the figures, so if two of your keywords show identical numbers, check they aren't the same searches counted twice. Search Console is the other route: in the Performance report, filter to queries containing “code” and read Impressions, the times your own site appeared for them.
• The share with others' ads. Godotoro's brand pages count it: Who's bidding records every check of “yourbrand discount code” and the advertisers it saw, and hands the share to the calculator. By hand, it's your own tally from Ad Preview and Diagnosis across several places and both devices, though that tool has no setting for the hour.
• Clicks those ads take. If a partner's traffic on your programme comes only from its ads on your name, the clicks your network recorded for it in a month, divided by the searches its ad showed on, is your own figure. Otherwise start from a study's.
• Conversion rate and order value. From your network, for those partners' sales, or from your analytics for the same traffic. A site-wide average mixes in every other kind of visit.
• Commission rate. Your programme's rate for those partners. If your network charges a fee worked out from commission, include it: a 30% fee on 8% commission makes 10.4%.
• Your own clicks and prices, if you have them. From your brand campaign on those searches: clicks a month, and Avg. CPC over weeks with other domains in Auction insights and over weeks without.

The share of clicks: what the studies found

This is the number you're least likely to have, and the studies that measured it looked at rival brands, not affiliates or code pages.

Simonov and Hill (2021) studied searches for brands on Bing in the US. While the brand's own link held the top paid place, rivals' ads took 1% to 2% of its traffic. When the brand's link was taken out of the top place, rivals took 6% to 15%, and the more relevant rivals got more of the clicks.

Simonov, Nosko and Rao (2018), also on Bing in the US, found that brands with no ad of their own lost 12% of their clicks on average when a rival's ad sat on top, and about 18% for the highest-traffic brands. With the brand's ad on top, a rival's ad below it took 1% to 2%.

The calculator starts at 2%, because most brands that bid on their own name hold the top place, and offers 12% for when yours doesn't. Treat both as a floor for code searches: an ad promising a code, on a search for a code, is more relevant to that searcher than a rival brand's ad on a bare name. And treat neither as certain. Golden and Horton (2021) found a case where a rival's ad gained almost nothing when the brand's own ad left.

What others' bidding adds to your own clicks

The second bill applies whoever the other advertiser is. Find two comparable stretches of your brand campaign on the code searches, one with other domains in Auction insights and one without, and read Avg. CPC for each. Google works it out as the total cost of your clicks divided by their number, so both figures are averages over every search in their weeks.

On these made-up numbers the price line is many times the commission line at the 2% default. That follows from the sum: every one of your clicks in those weeks can cost more, whether or not anyone clicks the other ad. A price can rise for reasons of your own too, from a new bid strategy to a seasonal sale, so read Change history for the same weeks before you put the difference down to anyone else.

What the sum can't say: orders that would have come anyway

Someone who searched “yourbrand discount code” had already chosen you. If the other ad hadn't been there, many would have clicked your own ad or your organic listing and bought anyway, with no commission. Others might have given up or gone elsewhere. No report shows which is which, because you only ever see the page that happened.

The studies measured something close: how many of a brand ad's clicks come back through the organic link when the ad goes, which is its incrementality turned round. Chan, Kumar, Ma and Koehler (2012), across 390 of Google's pause studies, found that when the advertiser ranked first organically, about half of the ad's clicks were incremental, so about half would have come anyway. Blake, Nosko and Tadelis (2015), on a very well-known US marketplace, found 99.5% of the traffic came back. Neither measured orders through a partner's ad, so the calculator doesn't pick one figure.

Each figure is the commission paid on orders that would have reached Yourbrand without the other ad; the rest is commission on orders the ads may have brought. Fifty per cent rests on Google's study, and 25% and 75% sit either side of it. For a very well-known brand with few others on its name the true share may be higher than 75%, and for a brand with a weak organic listing, lower than 25%.

How to work it out, step by step

1. List the searches: your name with “discount code”, “voucher code” and “promo code”, and any other words your search terms report or Search Console shows people adding to your name.
2. Add up their searches a month from Keyword Planner's Avg. monthly searches, or take three months of Search Console impressions for queries containing “code” and divide by three.
3. Find the share of those searches with another advertiser's ad: from Who's bidding on your brand page, or your own tally over at least a week of checks at different hours, places and devices.
4. Choose the click share. Use your network's figures if a partner's clicks can be separated out; otherwise start from 2%, or 12% if your own ad isn't on those searches, and treat the answer as a floor.
5. Take the conversion rate and order value for those partners' sales from your network or your analytics, and the commission rate from your programme, with any network fee added.
6. If your brand campaign enters those searches, note your clicks a month and Avg. CPC over weeks with others in Auction insights and weeks without, with Change history read for the same weeks.
7. Put the numbers in the calculator, or a spreadsheet, and keep the workings: each line with its sum, the year and the range.
8. Take the result to your programme terms. If the partners are allowed on those searches, it's what that permission costs. If they aren't, it's the size of the question for your network.

The ordinary explanations

A large number doesn't mean anyone did anything wrong, and a small one doesn't mean nothing is happening. Check the ordinary reasons a sum like this misleads before you act on it.

• The partners are allowed on those searches, by your terms or by an agreement made before your time. Then the sum is the price of a permission, and a fair input into whether to keep it.
• The other advertisers aren't partners at all. A reseller, a competitor or a marketplace seller earns no commission, so only the price line applies.
• Your own brand campaign doesn't enter the code searches, or switches off at night, leaving the top place open. That's what the 12% figure is for.
• Your Avg. CPC rose for a reason of your own: a new bid strategy, a changed target, a sale. Change history for the same weeks rules this in or out.
• The searches are seasonal. Average over three months or more, and work the sum out again around a sale.
• Code searches convert differently from your site as a whole, so a site-wide conversion rate can be well off in either direction.

Then decide with the range in view. Should you bid on your own brand? goes through each study in full, and the guide to paid-search rules covers what to write if partners shouldn't be on those searches.