Over the past few years we have analysed the Google Ads campaigns of 109 Italian companies across 18 different sectors: fashion, pharmaceutical, food, professional services, tourism, retail. Companies spending anywhere from €800 per month to over €30,000.
In 7 out of 10 cases we found the same line item in the Google Ads dashboard: an active campaign, allocated budget, CPC between €0.80 and €2.50 per click. Target: brand keywords.
In other words: they were paying Google to show their ad when someone searched for the exact name of their company.
If someone searches "Farmacia Rossi Napoli" they are almost certainly an existing customer, or someone who heard about the brand from a friend, or someone who was already on the site yesterday and is coming back.
That person would have clicked the organic result. For free.
Instead, that company was paying — €0.80, €1.20, sometimes €3.00 — for every click on a result that was already appearing in first place in the organic results.
Multiply by 400 clicks per month. By 12 months.
This is not a careless mistake. It is a systemic error, replicated at tens of thousands of euros per year, and almost always invisible to whoever manages the marketing budget because:
- 01
The ROAS of those campaigns appears extremely high: of course, anyone searching for your name was already about to buy.
- 02
No reporting tool automatically separates them from non-branded traffic.
- 03
The media agency has no incentive to flag it — that campaign keeps the average portfolio performance looking good.
When an Italian company starts with Google Ads, the standard process is this: the account is opened, the first campaign is created, the keyword planner suggests the most-searched terms related to the site. The company name is almost always among the first suggestions, often with the highest search volume.
It makes sense: it is what most people search for in relation to your domain.
So the brand keyword enters the campaign. The campaign performs well — taking credit for conversions that would have happened anyway. Nobody questions it. The following year the budget renews, the campaign stays.
In some cases, that branded campaign had been active for three years. Three years of budget spent reaching people who were already searching for you.
Working with an e-commerce in the parapharmaceutical sector, we did the simplest thing in the world: separate the branded campaigns from the non-branded ones and compare the costs.
Once those were removed, the real cost per acquisition — on customers who did not know us yet — was almost double what the dashboard showed. The account's ROAS was inflated by traffic that would have converted anyway.
It was not a fraud. It was a poorly built campaign architecture from the start, left untouched for 18 months.
We moved that 34% to prospecting campaigns, informational keywords, and competitor terms. Results after 3 months:
from new customers
acquisition
re-deploy time
The same pattern, with different numbers, repeated itself across almost all 109 accounts analysed.
Branded keyword waste is just the most visible version of a deeper problem: the confusion between loyal traffic and acquired traffic.
A company that does not distinguish the two does not know how much it really costs to find a new customer. It does not know where the budget it spends on growth is actually converting. It does not know what is working and what is merely sustaining.
This is why the average ROAS in the Italian Google Ads market is overly optimistic: it is inflated by branded traffic, navigational searches, and return visits that would have happened for free.
The numbers look good. The business is not growing.
This is the paradox of branded keyword waste: apparent efficiency masks real inefficiency.
Segment immediately.
Create a custom segment in GA4 or a filter in Google Ads that separates sessions from branded keywords from those that are non-branded. Then look at the two ROAS figures separately.
Decide whether to keep the branded campaigns.
It is not always wrong to bid on your own name — there are situations where competitors are bidding on your keywords, or where the ad lets you control the message at the most critical moment. But it must be a deliberate choice, not a forgotten default.
Move the freed budget into growth.
Informational keywords, cold audience campaigns, competitor terms — that is where you find new customers. Not in returning traffic.
Internal analysis of 109 active Google Ads accounts across 18 sectors, period 2022–2025. Individual client data anonymised and aggregated. To access the full dataset or discuss an audit on your account, write to commerciale@goodea.it.