Pharma · Rx brand (DTC)
Unbranded search was paying for traffic the brand site already won.
This marketing & margin audit identified $78k in wasted annual spend in a Pharma business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 7 days.
The business
An Rx pharmaceutical brand ran disease awareness (unbranded) search and branded search in parallel, with the two programs managed by different teams that rarely coordinated. Each team optimized and reported on its own campaigns separately, so while both looked reasonable in isolation, no one held a combined view of how the two efforts interacted across the same search landscape.
What triggered the audit
Combined search spend across the two programs was high, and because the teams reported independently, any overlap between them was structurally invisible. The audit examined both accounts together for the first time, testing whether unbranded and branded search were reaching genuinely different users or quietly competing for the same ones.
What the audit found
Viewed together, the two programs were substantially buying the same people twice. The unbranded, disease awareness campaigns were meant to reach early stage, uninformed audiences, but in practice a large share of the high intent visitors they captured were users the branded site would have won anyway through its own strong organic and branded presence. So the brand was paying twice to reach a single high intent visitor, once through unbranded search and again through branded, with the two teams each claiming their share and neither aware of the duplication. Because performance was only ever reviewed within each program, the overlap never surfaced. Netted across the year, this double buying of the same audience cost roughly $78k in avoidable, duplicated search spend.
What we changed
Deconflicted unbranded and branded search with shared negative keywords and audience exclusions, so the two programs stop capturing the same high intent visitor twice.
Unified both teams' bidding under a single coordinated plan spanning the full search landscape, ending the parallel purchasing of identical demand.
Appointed one cross team search owner to keep the two accounts from quietly drifting back into overlap as they’re optimized over time.
Reallocated the recovered spend toward the genuinely early stage, uninformed audiences the unbranded program was actually created to reach.
The result
The outcomes were measured for three months after a 90 day implementation period. $78k a year recovered by stopping two teams from buying the same visitor twice, an annual figure equal to 13× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee. For any pharma marketing lead, the structure caused the leak: unbranded and branded search reported separately, so the overlap was invisible to both. If your search programs run in silos, you may be paying twice for high intent visitors you’d win once anyway. Only looking across both accounts at once reveals it. A fixed fee audit does that in days and turns two competing programs into one coordinated engine capturing the same demand for far less.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 7 days, inside our fixed 5–7 day window.
What the client said
$78k a year of wasted spend cut in 7 days
High intent visitors paid for twice: ~1 in 3 → ~1 in 30
“Two teams, two search programs, one visitor bought twice. Leslie looked at branded and disease awareness search together for the first time: about one high intent visitor in three was paid for twice. Shared negatives and one plan ended it.”
Leslie MartinSenior Auditor · signed this audit off