Generic Keywords Remover Script
A script that strips brand traffic out of your Google Ads reports, so you can see what new customers from generic keywords really cost you to acquire.
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Increasing Brand Strength Transparency
In general, when we optimise an account, we want to constantly understand how strong the advertisers brand is, how much impact the brand has on the ads and how much the advertiser pays for the acquisition of new customers (customers who find the brand through generic keywords).
Brand, Branded, Generic Keywords Split
In order to achieve this, we usually separate the campaigns into three groups.
| Group | Search term it catches | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | "brand name" | How strong the brand already is |
| Branded | "brand name generic product name" | How much the brand carries the generic demand |
| Generic | "generic product name" | What a genuinely new customer costs to acquire |
This works fine, yields very interesting insights and is easy to manage for small to medium size accounts.
The Middle Way
One efficient way would be to leave away the branded campaigns and only keep a brand campaign and the generic campaigns running. By allowing phrase and broad match in the brand campaign we could still catch all branded search terms. For simplicity we would keep leading the visitors to the same landing page.
It is not ideal, but at least the users would arrive to the correct website and continue their journey on the website to find the product or service they are looking for. If the website is structured in a good way and has a decent search, the conversion rate would not suffer too much. Especially because people searching with branded search terms have a high intent to get exactly what they are looking for and are prepared to go longer lengths to get it.
The Middle Way Plus
Fortunately we can level this up even more. We can create a DSA campaign that is dedicated to only catch branded search terms. In order to do this we need to exclude all generic search terms. And because we love automation, we created a neat script that helps us with that. Simply create a DSA campaign as you would and add our script. It will automatically detect generic search terms in the search term report for that campaign and exclude the generic search terms. Over time the DSA campaign will only accept branded search terms and will lead visitors to the landing pages they are looking for. Thus maximising the conversion rate while keeping the maintenance at a manageable level.
Script
Feel free to use and share our script.