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Brand Defense: Niagara Falls, Canada

Objective

Defend brand queries in the Niagara Falls, Canada market from OTA conquesting (Viator, GetYourGuide, and similar marketplaces bidding on our own name). Niagara Falls is our flagship market: 72 live products (live CMS product counts, 2026-08-30, journal entry 003) and 3 dedicated paid landing pages already exist in app/(ad)/, which makes it the highest-value brand surface to protect first.

Success for this campaign is impression share on exact-brand terms and defended direct bookings, never ROAS. Brand search volume already belongs to us; this campaign's job is to make sure a guest who searches our name lands on our site and books direct, not on a marketplace listing that adds a booking fee and puts a reseller between the guest and the tour. Do not optimize this campaign toward ROAS or CPA targets. Judge it purely on impression share and on keeping OTA ads off our name.

Campaign settings

Setting Value Notes
Campaign type Search only No Display, no Video, no Shopping in this campaign.
Search partners OFF Keep inventory limited to Google Search results pages, where OTA conquesting actually happens.
Display expansion OFF This is a brand-defense line, not a reach line.
Geo targeting United States + Canada Presence or interest (Google's default). See rationale below.
Presence or interest rationale Default kept intentionally Guests planning a Niagara Falls trip typically research and book from home, before they travel, so "interest" (not just physical presence) correctly captures a US or Canadian traveler searching our name from their home city weeks before the trip. Do not narrow this to "Presence" only; that would cut off the pre-trip booking window this market depends on.
Language English
Bidding Target Impression Share 90 percent to 95 percent target.
Target location on page Top of results page Not "Anywhere on results page." Brand defense needs the top slot specifically, since that is where OTA conquesting ads compete for the click.
Max CPC cap 3 USD to start Revisit after two weeks of search-terms data; brand CPCs should trend down as Quality Score climbs.
Budget 75 USD per month to start Mid-point of the 50 to 150 USD per month range appropriate for an always-on brand-defense line in a flagship market; adjust up only if impression share stays below 90 percent at the CPC cap.
AI Max OFF See rationale below.

Why AI Max stays off: per docs/research/marketing/google-youtube.md:72, AI Max tested measurably worse than traditional match types on brand campaigns specifically: 100.37 USD CPA versus 43.97 USD CPA in the cited comparison, a roughly 35 percent lower ROAS outcome. Brand queries already convert at near-perfect Quality Score under plain exact match; there is no upside to layering automated broad-match expansion on top of a query set we already own by name, and the documented downside is a real CPA hit. Keep this campaign on exact match, AI Max off, for the life of the campaign.

Keywords

Exact match only. Every keyword below contains a brand token (see sight, seesight, or sea sight). No generic sightseeing keyword appears anywhere in this list, by design: "sightseeing tours niagara falls" is a generic category query, not our brand, and belongs in a non-brand campaign, not here.

Ad group 1: Core brand + Niagara

  • [see sight tours niagara falls]
  • [see sight tours niagara]
  • [seesight tours niagara falls]
  • [seesight tours niagara]
  • [see sight niagara falls]
  • [seesight niagara falls]

Ad group 2: Brand + tour intent

  • [see sight niagara falls tour]
  • [seesight niagara falls tour]
  • [see sight tours niagara falls tour]
  • [seesight tours niagara falls tour]
  • [book see sight tours niagara falls]
  • [see sight tours niagara falls booking]

Ad group 3: Brand variants and misspellings

  • [sea sight tours niagara falls]
  • [sea sight niagara falls]
  • [see sight tour niagara falls canada]
  • [seesight tour niagara falls canada]
  • [see sight tours niagara falls canada]
  • [seesight tours niagara falls canada]

Negative keywords

Campaign-level negatives, applied to all three ad groups.

Intent-mismatch negatives (broad match, to catch phrasing variants):

  • careers
  • jobs
  • hiring
  • salary
  • job application
  • employment
  • login
  • sign in
  • complaint
  • refund policy
  • lawsuit
  • class action
  • sue
  • scam

Close-variant leakage negatives (exact match), protecting against the generic sightseeing queries closest to our brand name:

  • [sightseeing tours]
  • [sightseeing tours niagara falls]
  • [niagara falls sightseeing]
  • [niagara falls sightseeing tours]
  • [sightseeing niagara falls]
  • [niagara falls sightseeing tour]

Review the search-terms report daily for the first 14 days (see Launch checklist) and add any additional generic-query leakage found there to this exact-match negative list.

Ads

One Responsive Search Ad per ad group, three ad groups, matching the keyword clusters above.

Ad group 1: Core brand + Niagara

headlines:
  - "Official See Sight Tours"
  - "Book Direct, No Fees"
  - "See Sight Tours Niagara"
  - "Best Price Guarantee"
  - "Free Cancellation 24 Hrs"
  - "Small Groups, Never Crowded"
  - "Local Guides, Not Scripts"
  - "No Booking Fees"
  - "You Book With the Operator"
  - "Rated 4.8/5, 10,000+ Reviews"
  - "Since 2006, 22 Cities"
  - "We Match Any Lower Price"
descriptions:
  - "You book with the company that actually runs the tour. Best Price Guarantee included."
  - "No marketplace between you and us. Free cancellation up to 24 hours before your tour."
  - "Small group tours in Niagara Falls with a local guide who knows the falls up close."
  - "Rated 4.8/5 across 10,000+ reviews on Viator, TripAdvisor, Google and more."

Pin "Official See Sight Tours" at headline position 1. This is the clearest signal to a guest scanning results that they have found the operator, not a reseller, and it is the single line doing the most work against OTA conquesting ads that impersonate our brand.

Ad group 2: Brand + tour intent

headlines:
  - "Official See Sight Tours"
  - "Book Direct, No Fees"
  - "See Sight Niagara Falls Tour"
  - "Best Price Guarantee"
  - "Free Cancellation 24 Hrs"
  - "Small Groups, Never Crowded"
  - "Local Guides, Not Scripts"
  - "Real Guides, Real Tours"
  - "You Book With the Operator"
  - "Rated 4.8/5, 10,000+ Reviews"
  - "Skip the Marketplace Markup"
  - "We Match Any Lower Price"
descriptions:
  - "You book direct with See Sight Tours, the company that runs the tour, not a reseller."
  - "Free cancellation up to 24 hours before your tour under our Change of Plans Guarantee."
  - "Small group tours in Niagara Falls with a local guide who knows the falls up close."
  - "Operating since 2006 across 22 cities in Canada and the USA. Book direct, no fees."

Pin "Official See Sight Tours" at headline position 1, same rationale as ad group 1.

Ad group 3: Brand variants and misspellings

headlines:
  - "Official See Sight Tours"
  - "See Sight, Not a Reseller"
  - "Book Direct, No Fees"
  - "Best Price Guarantee"
  - "Free Cancellation 24 Hrs"
  - "Small Groups, Never Crowded"
  - "Local Guides, Not Scripts"
  - "No Booking Fees"
  - "You Book With the Operator"
  - "Rated 4.8/5, 10,000+ Reviews"
  - "Since 2006, 22 Cities"
  - "We Match Any Lower Price"
descriptions:
  - "You book with the company that actually runs the tour. Best Price Guarantee included."
  - "No marketplace between you and us. Free cancellation up to 24 hours before your tour."
  - "We match any lower price you find. Book direct, no booking fees, no markup."
  - "Rated 4.8/5 across 10,000+ reviews on Viator, TripAdvisor, Google and more."

Pin "Official See Sight Tours" at headline position 1, same rationale as ad group 1. This ad group exists specifically to catch misspelled and variant searches ("sea sight," "see sight tour" singular) before an OTA ad catches them instead, so the "not a reseller" framing carries extra weight here.

Sitelinks

Four sitelinks, shared across all three ad groups.

Display text Final URL
Niagara Falls Tours https://seesight-tours.com/niagara-falls-tours-canada
Guest Reviews https://seesight-tours.com/reviews
Contact Us https://seesight-tours.com/contact
Our Local Guides https://seesight-tours.com/guides

Final URLs and UTM

Final URL for every ad and every keyword in this campaign:

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

Enable auto-tagging (ValueTrack gclid) in the Google Ads account settings so gclid is appended automatically alongside the UTM parameters on every click. This is required, not optional: lib/attribution/capture.ts reads gclid as one of the whitelisted ATTRIBUTION_PARAM_KEYS, stores it in the first-party ss_attr cookie on landing, and carries it through first-touch and last-touch into the eventual Stripe checkout metadata with no additional engineering work. As long as auto-tagging is on and the UTM parameters above are on the final URL, this campaign's attribution reaches Stripe automatically.

Launch checklist

  • Confirm AI Max is OFF at the campaign level.
  • Confirm Search partners is OFF at the campaign level.
  • Confirm Display expansion is OFF at the campaign level.
  • Confirm bidding is set to Target Impression Share, 90 to 95 percent, "Top of results page," with the 3 USD max CPC cap in place.
  • Confirm geo targeting is United States + Canada, "Presence or interest."
  • Confirm all keywords are exact match and every keyword contains a brand token.
  • Confirm the close-variant exact-match negatives are loaded at the campaign level.
  • Confirm auto-tagging (gclid) is enabled on the account so lib/attribution/capture.ts captures it on landing.
  • Confirm the final URL on every ad and keyword carries the brand-defense-niagara-falls-tours-canada UTM campaign parameter.
  • Conversion feed live check in Meta/Google diagnostics is not required for launch. This is a defensive brand campaign; it does not depend on conversion-based Smart Bidding to function, so a pending or incomplete conversion feed check should not block launch.
  • Check the search-terms report daily for the first 14 days. Add any generic-query leakage (variants of "sightseeing tours niagara falls" and similar) to the exact-match negative list the same day it appears.
  • Screenshot the exact-brand impression share metric weekly and log it for the readout described below.

Success metrics

  • Exact-brand impression share reaches 90 percent or higher within 4 weeks of launch.
  • Branded CPC stays under 1.50 USD once Quality Score stabilizes.
  • Monthly cannibalization audit shows OTA ads (Viator, GetYourGuide, and similar) displaced from the ad slots above our organic result on our own brand terms.
  • Journal entry 003 records the 4-week readout: final impression share, final branded CPC, and the outcome of the cannibalization audit.