Meridian Goods was spending heavily on branded search and treating the resulting conversions as incremental. They were not. A large share of that budget was buying clicks the organic listing would have earned for free.

We ran a geo-based holdout for six weeks, mapped the query overlap, and cut the terms where paid was cannibalising organic. The savings moved into two categories with genuine headroom.

Blended customer acquisition cost fell 38 percent with no drop in total revenue.