Pause for Effect: Measuring Branded Search’s True Impact

With a significant proportion of investment allocated to branded search, Samsung UK needed to move beyond assumption and understand whether the channel was truly incremental. In partnership with HAUS, Samsung deployed a robust geo based conversion lift test to isolate the causal impact of branded paid search on sales and revenue.

Using a 50% geo holdout, branded search was paused entirely in control regions while remaining live in treatment areas, with all other media continuing as normal. This created clean test conditions without disrupting business-as-usual activity. The objective was to determine whether branded search delivered incremental growth at an iROAS <£1 and to inform future search investment decisions.

The results delivered a confident and actionable outcome. While branded search did not meet the original hypothesis at category level, the test uncovered significant incremental halo effects across the wider ecosystem, particularly within Smartphones, delivering a 1.25x iROAS that would not have been visible through platform ROAS alone. The study fundamentally shifted stakeholder confidence from ROAS led optimisation to incrementality led planning, directly influencing the re optimisation of 62% of search investment and establishing a scalable, best practice framework for ongoing measurement.