47 competitor attacks. 8 client brands. 1 agency.

The agency

A UK-based PPC agency managing paid search for a portfolio of mid-market brands — retail, finance, SaaS, and professional services. Around 30 active Google Ads accounts, 8 of which had explicit brand-protection clauses in their management contracts. The agency had been handling brand monitoring manually: account managers would spot-check brand SERPs a few times a week, screenshot anything that looked suspicious, and email it to the client. It worked, mostly. But it was slow, inconsistent, and nobody could say with confidence that nothing had been missed.

The problem with manual monitoring

Before SerpAlert, each account manager spent roughly 40 hours a month on brand monitoring across their assigned clients. That's checking SERPs, taking screenshots, logging what they found, and composing client emails. Across 8 brands, the agency was burning 320 hours a month — the equivalent of two full-time employees — on a task that was still error-prone. Competitors who ran ads outside business hours (evenings, weekends, early mornings) went undetected. Short-burst campaigns that lasted 48 hours were routinely missed. One client later discovered a competitor had been bidding on their name for three consecutive weekends before anyone noticed.

What they set up

The agency connected SerpAlert to their Slack workspace and added all 14 brand keywords across the 8client accounts. Each keyword was set for hourly checks from London. The first alert landed in their #brand-monitoring channel within 23 minutes of activation — a competitor bidding on a fintech client's name that a manual check later that afternoon would have missed, because the ad only ran from 7am to 9am.

30 days of data

Over 30 days, SerpAlert ran 2,880 hourly checks and recorded 47 distinct competitor brand-bidding incidents across 8client brands. Six of the eight brands had at least one competitor bidding on their name during the monitoring period. The worst-affected client — a direct-to-consumer retail brand — saw 19 separate incidents from 4 distinct competitors. The cleanest client had zero competitor activity, which the agency used as evidence to justify pausing that client's £1,200/month defensive brand bid and redirecting it to acquisition campaigns.

The breakdown by sector: the fintech client saw 12 incidents from 2 competitors, the SaaS client 8 incidents from 3 competitors, and the professional services client 5 incidents from 2 competitors. The two remaining affected clients saw 1-2 incidents each, both from competitors running short test campaigns that lasted less than 48 hours. These were exactly the type of activity the old manual process was designed to miss.

The trademark complaint

The retail client's most aggressive competitor was a well-funded rival running brand-bid ads 18 hours a day with rotating creative. The agency had suspected it for months but never had the evidence. SerpAlert delivered: 1comprehensive evidence package was generated automatically — timestamped screenshots, ad copy variations, landing page URLs, and impression frequency data. The agency filed a Google Ads trademark complaint on the client's behalf. Google issued a takedown within 5 business days. The competitor's ads have not reappeared since.

What changed

• Manual monitoring eliminated — 320 hours per month of account manager time reallocated to strategy and optimisation. The equivalent of hiring a part-time employee without the salary.
• Client reporting transformed — every client now gets a monthly brand protection report pulled directly from SerpAlert data: total checks, incidents detected, competitors identified, and status of any enforcement actions. No more assembling screenshots in PowerPoint.
• Defensive spend optimised— the two clean brands paused defensive brand bids entirely, saving £2,400/month combined. The remaining brands are transitioning from blanket 24/7 defensive bids to alert-triggered bids — only increasing brand spend when SerpAlert detects a live competitor.
• Overnight and weekend coverage — for the first time, the agency has full 24/7 visibility. The 7am-to-9am competitor that triggered the first alert? It had been running for six weeks before the agency had SerpAlert. Nobody had ever manually checked that early.

The ROI

The agency pays £69 per brand per month on the Agency volume plan. For 8 brands, that's £552/month. Against 320hours of recovered account manager time (at an internal cost of roughly £35/hour), the monthly saving is £11,200. Add the £2,400 in paused defensive budget and the value of the trademark takedown — which the agency estimated would have taken another 2-3 months to assemble manually — and the picture is stark: SerpAlert pays for itself roughly 25 times over every month.

What the agency said

“We thought we were on top of brand monitoring. We weren't even close. The first 24 hours with SerpAlert showed us more than the previous six months of manual checks. Now our account managers spend their time on strategy instead of screenshotting SERPs, and our clients get proof that their brand protection budget is being put to work.”