Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Keeping impression share, impressions, clicks, and conversions fully intact while reducing CPC by 51%.

The key here is mindset and logic, not just the action itself. So, let me give you more details.

Background:

Imagine a US-based brand, a large business spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on Google Ads. I can’t reveal the actual brand or niche, so let’s assume it’s a brand that sells funny socks, and the brand name itself is “FunnySocks”.

This creates a tricky situation because when someone searches for “funny socks,” we can’t always tell whether they mean our brand or just the category in general. However, if they search for “funnysocks” (one word), we can be much more confident that this is a branded query.

Problem:

Now, let’s look at the account.

The previous agency had set up a branded search campaign, and it contained only two ad groups, each with just one exact-match keyword: [funny socks] and [funnysocks].

Branded ad groups

Per month, the brand spends €25K–€26K on this campaign. As you can see, the CPCs are quite similar, around €3.13, since both keywords operate under the same bid strategy, and the conversion volume is also close.

The campaign is running on a highly aggressive strategy with the following settings:

Old bid strategy

At the same time, we have another branded campaign, where all queries like “funnysocks near me”, “funnysocks discount code,” etc., were grouped together.

The most important thing I noticed? The CPC in this campaign is significantly lower - around €1.60.

This made us question why, and we noticed that this campaign was running on a less aggressive bidding strategy, specifically:

I was immediately concerned by such a high cost for branded traffic since branded traffic is usually much cheaper. Were we overbidding on our own brand?

Experiment:

We quickly launched an experiment and changed the bidding strategy to a less aggressive one: 95% and a max bid of €3 instead of 100% and a max bid of €6.

After a week, we get the following results at the campaign level:

CPC -42%
Impr -9.5%
Clicks -5.4%
SIS -4.5%
Cost -45%

Wow, we’ve found something. We managed to significantly lower CPC and costs. However, I wasn’t entirely happy because we lost a small share of impressions and clicks.

I dug deeper and realized that in one ad group ([funnysocks]), we lowered the cost without any losses—we even gained more traffic. But in the other ad group ([funny socks]), we experienced a drop.

Are you starting to get the idea?

Because our brand name matches the product category, the second ad group contained some cold traffic, leading to stronger competition.

Meanwhile, in the first ad group, where the brand name was written as one word (clearly branded searches), the brand was simply overpaying because both groups were using the same bidding strategy.

Solution:

The solution was quite simple:

We kept the [funnysocks] ad group in the original campaign with the less aggressive strategy (95% and a €3 max bid). Meanwhile, we moved the [funny socks] ad group into a new campaign with a more aggressive strategy (100% and a €6 max bid), allowing it to continue performing as before.

These two queries required different approaches to fully maximize their potential.

Results:

Search impression share remains high as it was, but CPC has dropped significantly:

Clicks remain stable:

Conversions remain stable, while costs have dropped by 53%

This ad group was spending €11K per month, and now we've achieved a €5.8K monthly savings, which translates to €70K per year.

This gives us the opportunity to redirect more budget into cold campaigns while fully maintaining volume—a pure uplift and a very clean win.