What is Brand Leakage?

Brand Leakage is paying non-brand campaign prices for searches that contain your own brand name — demand you already own, bought twice.

Why it matters

When brand terms slip into non-brand campaigns, two things go wrong at once: you pay a non-brand CPC for a searcher who was already coming to you, and your blended CPA looks better than your true acquisition cost — the CPA illusion that makes weak non-brand campaigns look healthy.

How ClickCatalyst detects it

Campaigns are classified as brand or non-brand with a name heuristic (names containing "brand", "branded", "bb", "tm", or "trademark"), which works for over 90% of accounts. Brand dependency is then measured: brand spend above 50% of the account is high risk, above 30% moderate.

The cannibalization check collects every distinct search term appearing in brand campaigns, then finds those same terms inside non-brand campaigns. Non-brand spend on those overlapping terms is the double payment.

Because some brand overlap is defensively useful, the incrementality cost applies a 70% weighting — only 70% of overlapping spend is counted as waste. The audit also tracks brand impression share over time to detect competitors bidding on your name.

cannibalized_spend = SUM(nonbrand_cost_on_brand_terms) × 0.7
cannibalized_pct   = cannibalized_spend ÷ total_account_spend × 100

Brand dependency: > 50% high · 30–50% moderate · < 30% healthy

Example

If non-brand campaigns spend $2,000/month on queries containing the brand name, the incrementality-weighted waste is $1,400 — budget that could fund net-new customer acquisition instead.