An aggressive PPC posture with two parts run together: (1) heavily defend branded search terms against cheaper competitors bidding on them, and (2) deliberately bid up core/generic category keywords specifically to inflate the CPC floor, ignoring ACoS on those terms even at breakeven or loss.
Unlike Aggressive Launch Bidding Strategy (Over-Bidding + Dynamic Up/Down) (a time-boxed launch tactic to win initial rank), this is an ongoing category-domination posture: raising the cost floor on generic terms makes the category more expensive for smaller competitors to compete in, and the margin hit is accepted as the cost of maintaining category-wide share of voice. It complements Branded vs. Generic Keyword Segregation by giving generic-keyword campaigns a share-domination mandate rather than a ROAS mandate.
A tracker brand runs breakeven/loss-tolerant bids on generic terms like "tracking card" and "wallet tracker" specifically to keep CPC high and price out competitors, while separately defending its own branded terms.
The guest's PPC team explicitly does not track ACoS (see PPC Efficiency Metric Formulas (ACOS, CTR, CVR, CPC)) for branded or main/category keywords — it's monitored only on long-tail/efficiency keywords. On core category keywords (e.g. "tracking card") and on branded-defense keywords, breakeven or loss-making ACoS is accepted as the cost of owning search share of voice.
Apply: Segment keyword tiers by objective, not just by match type — hold long-tail keywords to a normal ACoS target, but exempt branded and category-dominance keywords from ACoS review entirely and judge them on share-of-voice instead.
Operator framing from the SpotMinders/Jungle Powders case: 'we don't really look at ACoS, we want to make sure that we dominate it.' On branded and core category keywords, overpaying for clicks is treated as a deliberate category-domination tool, not a targeting inefficiency — ACoS is explicitly dropped as the success metric for this subset of keywords in favor of share-of-search dominance.