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Brand Defense: National (Pure Brand)

Objective

Defend brand queries from OTA conquesting. Viator, GetYourGuide, and similar marketplaces routinely bid on our exact company name to insert themselves between a guest who already wants us and the booking flow. This campaign exists to keep our own ad in the top slot on every spelling and near-spelling of "See Sight Tours," nationally, including every market that does not have its own dedicated brand campaign.

Success is impression share and defended bookings, never ROAS. Brand clicks are largely non-incremental by nature (the guest was already coming to us), so ROAS on this line will always look distorted relative to a growth campaign and must not be used to judge it. Judge it on exact-match impression share and on whether OTA ads still show above ours on our own name.

Campaign settings

  • Type: Search only. No Display, no Shopping, no Video mixed into this campaign.
  • Search partners: OFF. We want inventory we can see and control, not the partner network's blended reporting.
  • Display expansion: OFF.
  • Geo targeting: United States + Canada. Targeting setting: "Presence or interest" (Google default), not "Presence only." Rationale: guests plan and book a Niagara Falls, San Antonio, or other city tour from home, days or weeks before travel, so the searcher's presence at the time of the search is usually their home city, not the destination. Restricting to "Presence only" would exclude the exact pre-trip planning searches this campaign exists to catch.
  • Language: English.
  • Bidding: Target Impression Share, target 90 to 95 percent, location "Top of results page" (not "Anywhere on results page," since a brand defense line that wins the page but sits below an OTA ad has not done its job). Max CPC cap: 3 USD to start, reviewed weekly and lowered once Quality Score settles, since branded terms should not need a high ceiling to win against a marketplace bidding on a name it does not own.
  • Budget: 150 USD/month to start, allocated as a national catch-all backstop. Increase only if the search-terms report shows real exact-brand volume being capped by budget, never as a blanket "more is better" move.
  • AI Max: OFF, and stays off. Per docs/research/marketing/google-youtube.md:72, tested data on brand campaigns specifically shows AI Max underperforming traditional match types, with a cited comparison of 100.37 USD CPA under AI Max versus 43.97 USD CPA on a standard exact-match setup: a 35 percent lower ROAS outcome on the exact keyword set this campaign runs. Brand terms already carry near-perfect Quality Score and intent; automated broad-match expansion has nothing to add here and only invites budget leakage onto generic or competitor queries.

Keywords

Exact match only. Every keyword below contains a brand token ("see sight," "seesight," or "sea sight"). No generic sightseeing terms are included at any point in this campaign.

[see sight tours]
[seesight tours]
[sea sight tours]
[see sight tours reviews]
[seesight tours reviews]
[see sight tours promo code]
[seesight tours promo code]
[see sight tours coupon]
[seesight tours coupon]
[see sight tour company]
[seesight tour company]
[see sight tours official site]
[seesight tours official site]
[see sight tours phone number]
[seesight tours phone number]
[see sight tours discount]
[seesight tours discount]
[www seesight tours com]
[seesight-tours.com]
[sea sight tours reviews]

Negative keywords

Exact match negatives, split into two groups.

Off-intent traffic (jobs, complaints, account access):

[see sight tours jobs]
[seesight tours jobs]
[see sight tours careers]
[seesight tours careers]
[see sight tours hiring]
[seesight tours hiring]
[see sight tours salary]
[seesight tours salary]
[see sight tours application]
[seesight tours application]
[see sight tours login]
[seesight tours login]
[see sight tours sign in]
[seesight tours refund]
[seesight tours complaint]
[seesight tours lawsuit]
[seesight tours class action]

Close-variant generic leakage (queries that sound like our name but are actually generic sightseeing intent, not our brand):

[sightseeing tours]
[sightseeing tour]
[sightseeing tours near me]
[sightseeing tours niagara falls]
[sightseeing tours san antonio]
[niagara falls sightseeing]
[san antonio sightseeing]
[sightseeing tour company]
[best sightseeing tours]
[sightseeing bus tours]

This second group is a starting list. The search-terms report review in the launch checklist below is where city-specific and newly discovered generic near-misses get added on an ongoing basis.

Ads

One ad group for this campaign: National Brand Exact. One RSA.

headlines:
  - "Official See Sight Tours"
  - "Book Direct, No Booking Fees"
  - "You Book Direct With Us"
  - "No Marketplace In Between"
  - "Best Price Guarantee"
  - "We Match Any Lower Price"
  - "Free Cancellation, 24 Hrs"
  - "Small Groups, Never A Crowd"
  - "Local Guides, Real Knowledge"
  - "Touring Since 2006"
  - "22 Cities, USA and Canada"
  - "Rated 4.8/5, 10,000+ Reviews"
descriptions:
  - "You book with the company that actually runs the tour. No marketplace in between."
  - "Best Price Guarantee. We match any lower price you find, no exceptions."
  - "Free cancellation up to 24 hours before your tour. Plans change, we get it."
  - "Small groups with a local guide who knows the city. Touring since 2006."

Pin "Official See Sight Tours" to headline position 1. This is the clearest brand-ownership signal against an OTA ad that will otherwise lead with a generic city name. No other headline is pinned, so Google can rotate the remaining book-direct, guarantee, and trust-signal headlines for best combination performance.

Sitelinks

Display text Final URL
Our Tours https://seesight-tours.com/tours
Reviews https://seesight-tours.com/reviews
Contact Us https://seesight-tours.com/contact
Our Guides https://seesight-tours.com/guides

Display text is under 25 characters on each. This is the national catch-all campaign, so sitelinks route to the full tours listing rather than any single city page.

Final URLs and UTM

Final URL: https://seesight-tours.com/

Full tagged URL:

https://seesight-tours.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=brand-defense-national

gclid autotagging should stay enabled in the Google Ads account settings alongside this manual UTM string. Google appends gclid automatically on click, and per lib/attribution/capture.ts that parameter, along with the utm_* fields above, is captured client-side into the ss_attr first-party cookie (first-touch, write-once, and last-touch, overwritten) and carried through to Stripe metadata at checkout with no additional wiring needed. Nothing further needs to be added to the URL for attribution to work.

Launch checklist

  • Conversion feed live check in Meta/Google diagnostics: NOT required for launch. This is a defensive campaign measured on impression share, not on conversion optimization, so it can launch before that diagnostic is green.
  • Confirm AI Max is OFF at the campaign level.
  • Confirm Search partners is OFF at the campaign level.
  • Confirm Display expansion is OFF.
  • Confirm geo targeting is United States + Canada, "Presence or interest."
  • Confirm bid strategy is Target Impression Share, 90 to 95 percent, "Top of results page," with the 3 USD max CPC cap in place.
  • Confirm all keywords are exact match and every one contains a brand token.
  • Confirm both negative keyword lists are applied at the campaign level.
  • Confirm the RSA headline pin and full ad text pass character limits (30 for headlines, 90 for descriptions) and use only whitelisted claims.
  • Confirm all 4 sitelinks are live and each display text is 25 characters or under.
  • Search-terms report checked DAILY for the first 14 days after launch. Add any generic-query or off-intent leakage to the negative list the same day it appears, do not batch it weekly.
  • Screenshot exact-match impression share weekly, starting week 1, and log it against the success metrics below.

Success metrics

  • Exact-brand impression share reaches 90 percent or higher within 4 weeks of launch.
  • Branded CPC stays under 1.50 USD on a rolling weekly average.
  • Monthly cannibalization audit (manual search on our own brand terms, logged with screenshots) shows OTA ads displaced from the top of the page on our brand terms.
  • Journal entry 003 records the readout: impression share trend, CPC trend, and any negative keywords added during the first 14 days.