Looks like yoursLooks like yours

You search for your own brand on a Monday morning. At the top of the page sits an ad with your name in the headline and yourbrand.example under it, marked Sponsored. Your brand campaign, doing its job. You carry on.

Later that week your network books a commission on an order from a shopper who had searched for your name.

The ad you saw may not have been yours. An ad can show your address, read like your own and lead to your shop, and still run from another Google Ads account. Here's how, and what it does to your own ad and your reports.

How an ad gets your address

Every Google Ads text ad has a final URL: the page a click lands on. Nobody types the display URL's domain. Google takes it from the final URL, and only the display path after it, such as /official/sale, is free text.

So an advertiser whose final URL is https://yourbrand.example/ shows yourbrand.example. Nothing is disguised: the ad really does lead to your shop.

The network's link goes in the tracking template: a URL Google calls when the ad is clicked, with {lpurl} standing in for the final URL. An affiliate's might read https://trk.network.example/c?p=4471&url={lpurl}. Templates set at account, campaign or ad group level must include {lpurl}.

Google's Destination requirements ask that the display domain match the final URL, that the final URL not redirect to another domain, and that the tracking template lead to the same content. A template that ends on your page meets all three, so an ad built this way can pass review.

Parallel tracking has been mandatory on Search since 30 October 2018. The shopper goes straight to the final URL while the tracking template loads in the background. The network can still credit the sale: its tag on your site can read Google's click ID (gclid) from the landing URL, or identifiers in the ad's final URL suffix (parameters added to the end of the landing URL). Only some clicks follows that background request.

One ad per site, in each location

Google won't show several ads leading to the same or similar landing pages in one place. The one with the highest Ad Rank (Google's score for where an ad can show) appears. Google says this is “particularly applicable to affiliate and reseller advertisers”.

Since 14 April 2025 the rule works per ad location. The ads above the results and the ads below them are separate auctions, and an advertiser shown at the top can also enter the bottom one. If you learned “one ad per domain per page”, that's out of date.

The affiliate's ad leads to your site, and so does yours, so they compete for the same place. If the affiliate's ad wins the top location, your own ad can be the one left out there, though it may still appear at the bottom.

Why it's easy to miss

At a glance the ad is yours. Google doesn't restrict trade marks used as keywords, and restricts them in ad text only after a complaint naming a specific advertiser.

Your own campaign looks healthy too. The keyword is eligible and the ad approved. Losing the top location doesn't arrive as an alert. At most it shows indirectly: in Search lost IS (rank), Google's measure of impressions lost to low Ad Rank, and in price.

Auction Insights won't name the other account for you. Its rows are labelled by display domain, competitors that showed in under 10% of your auctions aren't shown, and Google doesn't document how an ad showing your own domain appears there.

What it costs

The plain cost is commission on a customer already looking for you. The less obvious one: it can land on a shopper you've already paid for.

On Thursday you may not pay for a click at all, so set that £2.00 against what a brand click costs you. Imagine fifty orders like it in a month: £100 in commission on shoppers already searching for your name, before any fee your network adds.

Your price can move too. Your actual CPC (cost per click) is the least you need to beat the ad ranked below yours, and ads further down affect it. More bidders on your brand terms can push it up while your bids stay the same.

Where it shows in your reports

In GA4, a click from a Google Ads account that isn't linked to your property shows as google / cpc, new data shows (not set) for its Google Ads campaign, and it isn't used for Google paid-channel attribution. So the order can look like your own paid search while your network credits an affiliate. GA4's Affiliates channel only takes visits whose medium is affiliate.

Once every Google Ads account of yours is linked, what's still google / cpc with its campaign (not set) is worth a look. Read its landing URLs: a gclid beside parameters your team never set, like pid=4471&src=dl_88, is a lead. Some iOS traffic carries gbraid or wbraid in place of the gclid.

You can often look up the URL's other identifiers, like that pid, in your network account. The gclid belongs to the other advertiser's Google Ads account, so you usually can't resolve it yourself.

The ordinary explanations

Most ads like this have a plain explanation. Rule out the ones closest to home first.

• Your own second Google Ads account, an old one never closed, or one another team at your company runs.
• Your agency, testing a campaign or running one everyone forgot about.
• An approved partner your programme allows to direct link (send ad clicks straight to your site) or to bid on your name, perhaps agreed before your time.
• A publisher who was never sent your terms, or terms that never mentioned direct linking.
• A sub-network's publisher who didn't know your rules. Behind the network covers how that happens.
• A campaign still running after the arrangement behind it ended, or a final URL pasted into the wrong ad.

Each of these is settled by a record someone already holds. Your part is to ask the right person a specific question.

What to do

1. Link every Google Ads account of yours, and any your agency runs for your brand, to your GA4 property, so the (not set) traffic left over is someone else's.
2. Record each sighting: the date and time with its time zone, the search, the device, the location, the ad as it read, and the advertiser Google names in “About this advertiser”, opened from the ad's three-dot menu. Take a full screenshot. Don't click the ad.
3. Search your domain in the Ads Transparency Center with the region set to the United Kingdom, and match each advertiser against your own accounts, your agency and your approved partners.
4. Line up GA4's leftover google / cpc transactions, with their unfamiliar parameters, against the network's order references that earned commission.
5. Make direct linking and the use of your domain as a display URL explicit in your terms. Brand search and your terms covers the wording.
6. Send the network the advertiser Google names and the order references before commission validation (when pending sales are approved or declined) closes.

For a documented case, Google has a route too. Its Unfair advantage policy lists “affiliates that advertise on Google Ads against the applicable affiliate program rules”, and Google warns at least seven days before suspending an account. You can report an ad from its three-dot menu, or with “Report this ad” in the Ads Transparency Center. What you can do goes through that route.

Seeing it in Godotoro

Godotoro's address pane, “Ads showing your address”, lists the advertisers Google's Ads Transparency Center shows for UK ads using your web address: whether Google verified each one, how many ads it has and when it was first listed. One whose name matches yours is marked “Same name as the store”. The pane is read weekly, and again by a check when it's over a day old.

Who's bidding records every ad as it showed on google.co.uk, searched from UK addresses in desktop browsers, with the advertiser Google names for it: the verified name, where they're based and their Ads Transparency id. When Google lists an affiliate network's address for an ad's click, Godotoro names the network. It never clicks an ad and never requests an ad's click link.

It describes what was seen. What that means under your own terms is for you to decide. To see who shows your address, check your brand.