Guide · Ads intelligence
Who holds the paid slots when a shopper types your brand name?
Why another brand’s paid slot often appears when a shopper types your name, how to check it, and what it does and does not mean.
A shopper who types your brand name has already decided what they want. Yet the page that comes back often carries another brand’s product, in a slot it paid for. This guide is about how common it is, how to check it properly, and what it does and does not mean.
It is the usual case, not the exception
Shelf searches brand names on each app at stores across the country, and counts the paid slots that come back. A brand is counted only when it held a paid slot in five or more cities.
Another brand held a paid slot on 51% to 98% of brand names, depending on the app. The brand itself held a paid slot on its own name on 14% to 70% of them.
These are not a ranking of apps: each app lays its results page out in its own way.
What it does not mean
It does not mean the other brand chose your name. Apps also place paid slots by category, so a brand whose paid slots run across dairy or snacks can appear on searches across that category, your name among them. When another brand’s paid slot turns up on nearly every name searched, placement by category is a likelier reading than a choice of each name. So the accurate sentence is: another brand held a paid slot on searches for your name, in N cities. The intent is not on the page.
How to check it yourself
- Open the app without signing in and set a delivery address in a city you sell in.
- Type your brand name, exactly, and note every result that carries the paid label, and the banner above the list if there is one.
- Refresh a few times. Paid slots rotate, so one page is one draw.
- Repeat in other cities and at another hour. Slots differ by both.
Done by hand this takes an afternoon for a handful of cities and tells you about that afternoon. That is the whole reason to count it over many searches: in how many cities did a brand hold a slot on your name, and in how many did you.
What to do with it
- Know who is there. A list of the brands on your name, with the cities, is a fact you can take into a conversation with the app.
- Know where you are not. The cities where you held no paid slot on your own name are a list, not a guess.
- Look at your unpaid place too. If your own products fill the first unpaid results on your name, a paid slot above them is a different matter from one sitting where you do not rank at all.
Whether to hold a paid slot on your own name is a decision about money and sales, which a page cannot show. We give no verdict on a slot. What a reading gives you is who was on the page, where, and when.