Aware, not accusingAware, not accusing

You search your brand and see an ad you didn't expect. Your own address on someone else's ad, perhaps, or a voucher site above your listing at eleven at night. The first feeling is often that someone is up to something.

Hold that feeling loosely. Most of what brands find on their own searches has an ordinary explanation, and the people involved are often partners you'd want to keep. This course explains how an ad can end up somewhere unexpected. It never says who, and it never assumes the worst.

This lesson makes that stance practical: what to rule out first, how to look, what to write down and how to ask.

Start with the ordinary explanations

Run through these before anything else. Each one can produce exactly what you saw, and none of them needs anyone to have done anything wrong.

• An approved partner. Someone in your team, possibly before your time, may have allowed a partner to bid on your name, in certain hours or with certain wording, and the permission never made it into the file you're reading.
• Your own agency, or another team. An agency, a regional team or a marketplace team at your company can run its own Google Ads account, and About this advertiser will show that account's name, not yours.
• A reseller or marketplace seller. A business that stocks your products can advertise on your name, and Google's Trademarks policy makes room for ads whose landing page sells the products.
• A publisher who never received your terms. If your paid-search section was added after they joined, or never reached them, they may not know the rule exists.
• A sub-network's publisher. A sub-network joins your programme as one publisher and has its own publishers behind it. Your terms reach them only if the sub-network passes them on.
• An old campaign. A campaign built for a past promotion, or by a partner you've since stopped working with, can keep running until someone pauses it.
• A mistake. A broad-match keyword that reaches further than intended, or a negative keyword list that was never attached to a new campaign. Close variants mean even exact match catches searches Google judges to mean the same thing.
• A misread report. In GA4, google / cpc sessions with the Google Ads campaign “(not set)” can come from any Google Ads account that isn't linked to your property, your own included. Link every account you own before reading anything into them.
• A difference between your check and their settings. An ad can target cities you're not in, devices you don't use or hours you don't check. Its schedule runs on the advertiser's own account time zone, fixed when the account was created, which may not be yours.

Some of these will still turn out to be outside what your terms allow. Then the answer is a correction, agreed with the partner, not a confrontation.

Look without fooling yourself

The way you check can change what you see.

• Stop refreshing. Google says that if you keep searching for your own ad without clicking it, you may stop seeing it, because Google stops showing ads it thinks you aren't interested in. Your checking can change the results for you alone. Ten searches from your desk are one viewpoint, ten times.
• Use Ad Preview and Diagnosis in Google Ads. It shows the same results as a Google search for a location, language and device you choose, without adding impressions. Try several UK cities and all three device types: computers, mobile phones and tablets. It has no time-of-day setting, ads that rank on page two or later may be missing, and Google says it may not reflect all campaign activity.
• Vary the place. Location targeting and exclusions are ordinary settings, and an ad aimed at other cities won't show in your office. Not where you are goes into those settings.
• Vary the hour. Ad schedules switch ads on and off through the day, and Auction Insights splits by day of week but never by hour. A clear page at ten in the morning says nothing about ten at night. Out of hours explains how.
• Vary the search. The bare name and “yourbrand voucher code” can draw entirely different advertisers, so check the code searches as well as your name.

One sighting is a starting point. The same ad seen across several checks, on different days, gives you something specific to ask about.

Write it down

An observation that isn't recorded is just a feeling. It can't be checked, compared with your records or passed to someone who can act on it. For each sighting, keep:

• When: the date and time, with the time zone. Google Ads, GA4 and your network can each run on a different clock.
• Where: the place you searched from, and how. Office network, home broadband, mobile data or Ad Preview's location setting.
• The device and the browser.
• The query, exactly as typed.
• The ad as it read: headline, description, display URL and path, and whether it sat at the top or the bottom of the results.
• The advertiser Google names. The ad's three-dot menu opens About this advertiser, with the verified name and where they're based. Their page on the Ads Transparency Center carries their id, AR followed by 20 digits, in its address.
• A full-page screenshot, with the time visible if you can manage it.
• Your own records from the same window: order references, the publisher each order was credited to, and the landing URLs your site recorded.

Then compare it with what you already hold: your list of approved partners and what each may do, your agency's accounts, your resellers. A sighting can end there, with an answer and no email.

Ask, don't accuse

Take it to your network first. It holds the publisher relationships, the click records and the terms each publisher accepted, and it can match the advertiser Google names to a publisher in a way you can't. Go straight to a partner only where you work with them directly.

Make it a question: specific, with the evidence attached. Say what you saw and ask what it was. Leave out any conclusion about who or why, because you don't have one yet. Questions like these get answers:

• “On Tuesday 13 October at 21:40, from London on desktop, a search for ‘yourbrand discount code’ showed the ad in the attached screenshot, with yourbrand.example as its display URL. The advertiser Google names, and its Ads Transparency id, are below. Is this one of our publishers, and which version of our terms do they have?”
• “These twelve orders, references attached, were credited to one publisher between 19:00 and 07:00 last week. Can you show us the clicks behind them, and how those clicks reached our site?”
• “Is any partner approved to bid on our brand in the evenings? If so, who approved it, and when?”
• “Which sub-publisher sits behind this click reference, and has the sub-network passed our paid-search terms on to them?”

A click reference, or sub ID, is free text a publisher adds to its own tracking link. It describes a click, not who ran an ad, which is why the question asks what sits behind it.

Then give it time. The network may need to ask the publisher, and the publisher may need to check its own accounts. Agree a date for a reply. If matching commission is still pending, say so in the first message. Commission is usually locked once your programme's validation window closes (the period in which you can approve or decline a sale, often a month or two), and money already paid rarely comes back. What you can do covers the deadline.

What not to do

• Don't click the ad to test it. A click is charged to the advertiser unless Google judges it invalid. Under parallel tracking, Google sends the shopper straight to the final URL and runs any tracking in the background, so a test click shows only how a server treated your browser that once. It can also leave a tracking cookie behind, so a later order from that browser could earn a commission.
• Don't name a company in public. A post about a named business turns a question into a dispute, and you may have the wrong business, the wrong account or the wrong explanation.
• Don't act before you've asked. Removing a partner over a sighting that turns out to be your own agency costs you a relationship and teaches you nothing.
• Don't let a promise close the matter. When the answer comes, check the same search again later, at the same hours, from the same places.

If you decide to report an ad to Google, use Report ad in its three-dot menu, or Report this ad in the Ads Transparency Center. Neither is a click on the ad.

Keep your terms current, and sent

Most questions get easier when your terms are clear. Date each version. Write down which partners may bid on your name, on which searches, in which hours and where. Send the current version to your network, ask it to confirm that every publisher and sub-network has it, and give your agency the same copy.

Every question then rests on a plain one: did the terms that applied that day allow what you saw? Brand search and your terms covers what terms usually say.

Godotoro's own rule

Godotoro holds itself to the same stance. It records what it saw: the search, the ad as it showed, when it showed, and the advertiser Google names, with the verified name, where they're based and their Ads Transparency id. It never clicks an ad and never requests an ad's click link.

It states observations, never verdicts. An advertiser in its lists is one that was seen, nothing more. Whether a sighting is permitted, a mistake or something to raise with your network depends on your terms and your records, and that's for you to decide.

For brands on its schedule, it searches every four hours by default, nights included, so the record doesn't depend on when you happened to look. You can check your brand for free.