Discovery Diaries: Scott Carruthers

27 July 2026

“Why the wrong clicks cost more than no clicks”

Our Q&A Discovery Diaries series takes on a Paid Media lens as Journey Further’s Senior Director of Paid Search, Scott Carruthers, discusses why discovery trumps visibility, and attracting the right traffic is vital. Because a click from the wrong person will fail to convert and will actively consume budget, time and resources.

Find out how to get your brand truly found, understood, and chosen in the new discovery era of Paid Search.

Describe in as few words as possible what brand discovery means to you

Being found by the right people when they're actually ready to buy.

What do you believe makes a brand genuinely understood?

A brand is understood when someone knows whether it's for them or not without having to dig around. In Paid Search, you can see this play out clearly - if your ads are doing their job properly, your Click Through Rate (CTR) shouldn't be constantly improving, because good ads qualify people out before they click.

In ad that says "£500 minimum order" or "B2B only" gets a lower CTR than one that doesn't, but the traffic converts better because everyone who wasn't a fit already left.

Same thing on your site - if your product descriptions are clear, your pricing is upfront, and your navigation makes sense, people either self-select in or they leave quickly.

That's being understood - making it obvious enough that the right people move forward and the wrong people don't waste their time or your budget.

Most brands are scared of this; they want everyone to click, everyone to stay, everyone to convert - but being understood means being clear enough that you lose the wrong people early.

When it comes to discovery, what’s one insight or approach you’ve learned that others often overlook, and how can brands use this to their advantage?

Clients almost always think of PPC as a demand capture channel. And they're not wrong — that is what it does. But it's the least interesting thing about it.

The insight that gets overlooked is that PPC is also the best demand intelligence tool most brands have access to, yet they never use it that way.

Although it’s commonly construed as a simple list of what’s converting, the search query report is a map of how people actually describe their problem, in their own words, at the exact moment they want it solved. That's not just useful for PPC. That's brand language intelligence. The gap between how people search and how a brand describes itself is often where discovery breaks down entirely.

Auction insights and impression share data show you exactly who is competing for the same demand, at what intensity, and where you're being displaced. That's live competitor intelligence that most channels can't get anywhere near.

We live in an era where 56% of marketers don’t have enough time to analyse their data properly, but it really is about carving out some of your day to use these insights in the right way.

And then there's what I'd call demand absence. Where there are no searches, or where branded searches are low relative to category searches, PPC is telling you that a brand doesn't yet exist in someone's consideration set.

That's not a bidding problem. That's a discovery problem, but most people never frame it that way.

The thing is, none of this intelligence ever leaves the account. It gets used to tweak bids and tighten match types, and then that's it. The brand team never sees it. The leadership never sees it. It just sits there.

Fix that, and you've changed what PPC can do for the business.

How do you think brand discovery has evolved over the last five to 10 years?

Honestly, I'm not sure the underlying challenge has changed that much. People still need to find you. You still need to be present when they're looking. That part is the same.

What's changed is how fragmented and unpredictable that journey has become. Five to 10 years ago, you could build a fairly reliable map of how someone discovered a brand. Now that map has a hundred more entry points — AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok — and you can't always control where someone finds you first.

But the bigger shift, from a PPC perspective, is in how we should be thinking about the data we have access to.

The signals (search queries, auction pressure, impression share gaps, category language trends) have always been there, but we've spent years treating them as optimisation inputs rather than intelligence. The evolution isn't in the tools. It's in how we use what's already in front of us.

A demand map — a proper view of what people are searching for, how that language is shifting, where presence gaps exist, and which discovery moments are being won or lost — isn’t a new concept. It's just something we've consistently under-delivered on. That's the evolution that matters.

What do you believe the difference is between visibility and actually being chosen as a brand?

Visibility is easy - anyone with a budget can get visibility, just throw money at ads and people will see you.

Being chosen is different - that's when someone actively picks you over the alternatives because they trust you'll solve their problem better. And trust is now more important than ever, with consumers increasingly likely to buy from, advocate for and remain loyal to brands they perceive as credible and transparent.

But that trust doesn't come from one ad or one campaign; it comes from consistently proving you know what you're doing across every interaction.

I see this in the data all the time - accounts with loads of impressions and decent CTR but terrible conversion rates, because visibility got them there but there was nothing backing it up when people actually looked closer.

Being chosen means you've done the work before that moment - your site works, your product's good, your messaging is clear, and you've built enough credibility that people believe you'll deliver.

Visibility gets you in the door, and everything else determines whether you get picked.

What is a campaign you’re particularly proud of that you’ve overseen that has truly unlocked brand discovery as far as you see it?

Boots Hearingcare - we built an award-winning system that adjusted Google Ads budgets based on real-time appointment availability at each location.

The problem: spending budget driving people to branches that were fully booked, so they'd bounce and book somewhere else.

The solution: if a location had slots available tomorrow, push budget there; if they're booked solid, pull back.

31% more bookings, 20% lower cost per booking.

But the real win was changing when people discovered the brand - only being visible where we could actually deliver value immediately, not just everywhere equally.