Google Ads for Branded Resellers
If you resell other people's brands, your Google Ads account wins or loses on structure, not on creative. You are selling identical products, often at an identical price, against the brand's own site and every other authorised stockist, so the money is made by separating brand demand from generic demand, controlling what Performance Max is allowed to spend on, and fixing the product feed so your listings show for the searches that actually convert.
Almost every reseller account we look at leaks budget in the same three places: generic category searches that never convert, Performance Max quietly harvesting brand traffic you would have got for free, and a feed that stops you appearing for the model numbers people actually search.
Why is Google Ads harder for resellers than for brands?
Because you have no product differentiation and often no price differentiation either. A brand owner competing on their own name has a quality score advantage, a landing page that matches the search exactly, and no other seller with the same claim. You have none of that.
What you do have is breadth. A reseller usually stocks many brands, many variants and many price points, which means far more long tail search coverage than any single brand site. That breadth is the asset. The job is to spend on the part of it that converts and stop funding the part that does not.
In practice this means three campaign layers: a tightly controlled brand layer, a Shopping or Performance Max layer segmented by margin and brand, and a generic search layer that is kept deliberately small until it proves itself.
How should a reseller structure a Google Ads account?
Split by commercial reality, not by product taxonomy. The account should mirror how much margin each group of products carries and how much competition sits on each search.
- Own brand search: your retailer name and misspellings, capped tightly, purely defensive.
- Supplier brand plus product search: brand plus model, brand plus spec, brand plus "buy" or "UK". High intent, worth paying for.
- Shopping or Performance Max, split by margin band: high margin brands separated from thin margin brands so each can carry its own target return.
- Generic search: category terms only, kept small, exact and phrase match, with an aggressive negative list.
Read the detail in how to structure Performance Max across a multi brand catalogue.
Where does reseller budget actually leak?
Generic top of funnel searches and uncontrolled Performance Max are the two biggest drains, and they are usually invisible in the top level report because brand traffic props the blended return up.
Worked example. A retailer with 40 brands in the catalogue and a £15,000 monthly budget arrives spending roughly £6,000 on a single catch all Performance Max campaign, £5,500 on broad generic search, £2,500 on brand terms and £1,000 on remarketing. Blended ROAS looks acceptable. Strip out the brand and remarketing spend and the generic search layer is returning far less than the account average, while the single Performance Max campaign is spending most of its budget on the ten best known products it would have sold anyway.
A structure that fits the same £15,000 better: £2,000 brand and defensive search, £7,500 Shopping and Performance Max split into three margin bands, £3,500 tightly matched generic and model number search, £1,200 remarketing and £800 held back for testing. Same budget, very different distribution of intent.
Full breakdown in brand vs generic: where reseller budget actually leaks.
What do you do when the supplier bids on the same terms?
You stop trying to beat them on their own name and take the searches they are slower to cover. Brands usually bid hard on their head term and their hero products, and much less consistently on model numbers, spare parts, discontinued lines, bundle searches and comparison terms.
If you are an authorised stockist, check what your dealer agreement actually says about paid search before you change anything. Many agreements restrict bidding on the brand name in ad copy or in the display path rather than banning it outright, and some brands run a co-op budget that will fund part of your spend.
See how to run Google Ads when your supplier is bidding on the same terms.
How do you compete in Shopping when the price is fixed?
Under MAP pricing the listing itself becomes the differentiator. Titles, delivery promise, stock status, review count and the annotations Google can attach to your listing decide who gets the click when every price on the page is identical.
Feed work carries most of the weight here: model numbers in the title, correct GTINs so you appear in the product comparison unit, accurate availability, and shipping data specific enough that Google can show a real delivery date rather than an estimate.
More detail in Google Shopping with MAP pricing.
What does this look like when it works?
Spend moves towards searches where you have a genuine reason to win, and the blended numbers stop hiding the weak areas. Reporting should show brand, generic and Shopping separately, each with its own target, so nothing subsidises anything else quietly.
[CLIENT RESULT: insert real figure]
A worked example of the same approach on a live account is in our ecommerce growth case study.
Who we work with
UK ecommerce brands and premium branded resellers, typically spending £10k or more a month on ads. We manage accounts directly on a flat monthly fee with a rolling contract, so you are never tied in and we are never paid more for spending more of your budget.
We do not offer whitelabel services or training.
Guides for resellers
Frequently asked questions
Can a reseller ever outrank the brand's own website?
On the brand's own name, usually not, and chasing it is expensive. On product model numbers, bundles, stock availability and category terms, resellers win regularly because the brand site is often slower to list variants and rarely competes hard on long tail model searches.
Should we bid on the brand names we stock?
Yes, but narrowly. Bid on brand plus product, brand plus model number and brand plus buying intent terms. Avoid broad brand head terms where the brand's own site, marketplaces and every other stockist are all bidding, because clicks are expensive and conversion rates are diluted.
How much monthly ad spend do we need for this to work?
Most reseller accounts we take on spend £10k or more a month. Below that you can still run profitably, but there is less room to separate campaigns by brand and margin, so structure has to stay simpler.
What if our supplier enforces MAP pricing?
Then price is not your lever and the account has to compete on availability, delivery speed, bundles, warranty, service and feed quality. Shopping still works under MAP, but the feed and the offer have to do the work that a lower price would normally do.
How do you charge?
A flat monthly fee based on the size and complexity of the account, on a rolling contract. Not a percentage of ad spend, so there is no incentive for us to push your budget up.
Want this looked at properly?
We will audit your account, show you where the money is leaking and tell you honestly whether we can improve it. Flat monthly fee, rolling contract, no lock-in.
Get a free Google Ads audit