#How much money are you actually losing?
A real study on branded search showed that when you don’t show up on your own name and someone else does, they take 18–42% of the clicks. When you own the top spot, that drops to almost nothing.
These aren’t tire-kickers. These are people who typed your name. Service customers who got the reminder. Buyers who already decided on you. You lose them and it never shows up as a lost lead in your CRM. It just looks like a soft month.
Average stores write around 16,000 ROs a year. Lose even a few ready sales appointments and a handful of service customers a month to the store across town and you’re looking at real money. Do it for a year and it’s six figures that never got tracked. Meanwhile you’re spending a fortune on generic keywords that convert way worse.
Defending your own name is cheap. Clicks are usually a couple bucks. It costs the other dealer more to steal those same clicks because their ad is less relevant. So either you’re losing the business, or you’re forced to spend more just to keep what should have been yours. Both options suck. The third option is reporting them.
#A lot of brands don’t even allow this
For many OEMs, bidding on another dealer’s name in the same franchise is against the rules. Stellantis has been explicit about it. Toyota’s guidelines don’t allow you to pretend to be another dealer. Other brands enforce it through their advertising covenants.
If it’s not allowed, this is an easy email to your OEM rep. Send them the ad, the search, the time, and the location. It gets shut down. And it’s usually a violation for the other dealer, not just an annoyance for you. Why are you letting them take your traffic when you can just report it?
Even if your manufacturer allows it, you still need to know who’s doing it. Are you even tracking this? Because if you’re not looking every day, you have no idea who’s eating your name.
#You have to check this every single day
These campaigns turn on and off. A competitor runs it over the weekend or for a service special, then turns it off before your report ever sees it. Auction Insights only shows you last week if you were already bidding. It doesn’t show you the actual ad that ran on Saturday night.
You need to know exactly who showed up, what the ad said, what was searched, when it happened, and where. That’s the stuff you forward to your OEM or your agency.
That’s what Overwatch does. It runs searches on your name (and the service and parts variations) every day, multiple times a day. You get the ad, the timestamp, the query, who appeared, and the location. Then you can report it or decide how much you need to spend to defend it. It also tells you when it’s safe to bid on competitors’ names and when it’s not.
#Play offense and defense or stop complaining about leads
If no one is bidding on your name and you’ve actually verified that, fine, don’t bid on it. But most of the time someone is. The old idea of “we don’t bid on our name” only works when you’re 100% sure no one else is. Otherwise you’re just donating traffic.
You should be checking this constantly. Report the ones that aren’t allowed. Defend the ones that are. And when it makes sense, go after their names too. This is basic offense and defense. Most dealers aren’t doing either one.
You’re crazy if you think this isn’t costing you money. The only question is whether you’re going to start tracking it or keep pretending it isn’t happening.