Most paid search accounts have a problem nobody talks about in the quarterly review: they’re bidding on searches the brand already wins for free.
It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. Multiply it across a portfolio of ten brands, each with its own campaigns, categories, and keyword lists, and you’re not just wasting budget — you’re actively working against yourself. One brand’s keywords bleed into another’s. Organic rankings get duplicated by paid spend. The account keeps running, the budget keeps spending, and nobody’s quite sure why the numbers aren’t better.
That’s roughly where L’Oréal and WPP Media were. Multiple divisions are active in Google Ads simultaneously, each generating a volume of daily data that is genuinely impossible to keep up with manually. The accounts weren’t broken. They just weren’t working as hard as they could.
The thing about Google’s algorithms
Here’s what most marketers know but few act on: Google’s bidding is only as smart as the data you feed it.
If your keyword structure is messy — duplicates across brands, paid campaigns competing with your own organic results, categories bleeding into each other — Google’s algorithms are making decisions on incomplete information. You end up in auctions you shouldn’t be in. You pay more than you need to. And the performance gap between what’s possible and what’s actually happening quietly widens.
The fix isn’t a bigger budget. It’s a cleaner setup.
What actually changed
L’Oréal and WPP Media brought in Amanda AI to do three things: continuously mine for new keywords, stop bidding when organic already ranks, and keep brands properly separated.
The keyword-mining piece is straightforward in principle but tedious in practice. Amanda AI runs it automatically — discovering new search terms, checking them against a quality score threshold, and adding the relevant ones as exact match keywords. Coverage expands without anyone spending a Tuesday afternoon on it.
The organic integration is where it gets interesting. Amanda AI connects directly to Google Search Console and reads L’Oréal’s organic rankings in real time. Any query where a brand already holds a strong organic position — Amanda AI stops bidding on it. Not because bidding there is always wrong, but because in most cases, you’re just paying for a click you would have gotten anyway. That budget goes somewhere more useful.
And Keyword Fencing keeps the portfolio from cannibalizing itself. In a multi-brand setup, it’s surprisingly easy for one brand’s keywords to show up in another brand’s campaigns. Fencing builds hard boundaries between them — so each brand is competing in the right auctions, for the right searches, without interference from the rest of the portfolio.
The results speak for themselves
+136% conversions
–53% average CPA
–50% average CPC
+154% impressions
+128% clicks
All on 12% more ad spend.
That’s not a typical paid search story. Volume more than doubled. The cost per conversion was cut in half. The budget increase required to get there was minimal.
The one that tends to get overlooked: operational workload dropped by 19%. That’s the hours that used to go into manual bid adjustments, keyword reviews, and keeping everything aligned — now handled automatically. Which meant the WPP Media specialists could stop being account janitors and start focusing on the work that actually needs a human: category strategy, brand decisions, and expansion planning.
As Nicholas B. Jakobsen, Executive Activation Director at WPP Media, put it, the machine handled the repetitive heavy lifting. The team got its focus back.
“We implemented Amanda AI to run Search across several brands and categories. Instead of relying on manual work, we focused on creating a setup that supported scaling and improved the quality of the signals sent to Google.”
Why this matters beyond L’Oréal
The paid-and-organic silo problem isn’t unique to beauty brands or large portfolios. It exists in almost every account where paid search and SEO are managed separately — which is most of them.
The default setup is: SEO team optimizes for organic rankings, paid team optimizes for ROAS, and neither team has a clear picture of what the other is doing. The result is duplication, waste, and a budget that’s working harder than it needs to.
Connecting those two things — making paid search aware of what organic is already doing — is one of the most straightforward ways to get more out of the same budget. It doesn’t require a rebrand or a restructure. It requires the right data flowing to the right place.
That’s what Amanda AI does. Not magic. Just decisions made with better information, faster than any team could make them manually, across every account, every day.
The budget didn’t get bigger. It just stopped going to the wrong places.
