TL;DR — what four weeks of live search showed
- Demand is overwhelmingly tokenization, not custody.62% of all impressions came from tokenization / RWA searches — "tokenization of assets," "rwa tokenization," "dtcc tokenization," "blackrock tokenization," "tokenized treasuries," "real estate tokenization." Every other theme combined is the remaining 38%. This maps to AMP (tokenized-asset issuance on Liquid), not the custody pitch the ads currently run.
- Brand demand is a mirage.Only ~300 brand impressions in a month — almost nobody searches "blockstream enterprise." The 17% brand CTR looks great but it's "blockstream lugano" (the event) and "blockstream capital partners" (the investment arm) — not custody intent. Real enterprise-brand search is near zero.
- The clearest custody engagement is on competitor names.Small volume, but the highest custody-side click rates we have: "copper crypto custody" 20%, "custodian crypto" 20%, "bitgo custody" 9.7%, "ledger enterprise" 4.8%. When someone searches a rival's custody product, our ad gets noticed.
- The five ICP-targeted ad groups never served.Built May 13 — Qualified Custodian, RIA & Family Office, Corporate Treasury, Enterprise Multi-Sig, Competitor Conquest — all 0 impressions. Keywords were phrased the way we talk ("fireblocks qualified custodian") not the way buyers search ("fireblocks custody"), and a $30/day max-clicks budget funnelled everything into the one broad tokenization term.
- This independently confirms the Quant brief.That analysis forecast — from Ahrefs estimates — that tokenization-issuer terms carry more demand than the other four ICP segments combined. The live auction agrees, from a completely separate data source.
Search demand by theme — what people type
Reported search-term impressions, May 5 – 31 (3,046 impressions across 559 terms)
Tokenization / RWA→ AMP issuance
1,888 · 62%
Competitor names→ Custody conquest
447 · 15%
Generic custody→ Custody & Treasury
422 · 14%
Brand (Blockstream)→ mostly off-target
105 · 3%
Wallet / multisig→ negligible
10
The volume sits in tokenization. The engagement sits in competitor-custody. The brand "demand" is the Lugano event. We are spending most of the budget on the highest-volume, lowest-pull theme — with an ad written for a different one.
What's generating clicks — the magnets
| Search term | Theme | Impr | Clicks | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| blockstream lugano | Brand · off-target | 32 | 10 | 31.2% |
| tokenization of assets | Tokenization | 248 | 5 | 2.0% |
| blockstream capital partners | Brand · off-target | 19 | 4 | 21.1% |
| rwa tokenization | Tokenization | 121 | 3 | 2.5% |
| bitgo custody | Competitor | 31 | 3 | 9.7% |
| real estate tokenization | Tokenization | 24 | 2 | 8.3% |
| ledger enterprise | Competitor | 42 | 2 | 4.8% |
| copper crypto custody | Competitor | 5 | 1 | 20.0% |
| custodian crypto | Custody | 5 | 1 | 20.0% |
| digital asset custody | Custody | 13 | 1 | 7.7% |
- Brand clicks look amazing but aren't custody.17% CTR — but 14 of 18 brand clicks are "lugano" and "capital partners." Both are off-target; both burned premium CPCs ($12–$14). ~$177 of the $523 brand budget went to searches that have nothing to do with custody. Easy fix: negative "lugano," "capital partners," "zurich."
- Tokenization pulls the most raw clicks (32) but at a weak 1.7%.People search it constantly; our custody-framed ad doesn't speak to them. The biggest term, "dtcc tokenization" (291 impressions), drew 2 clicks — 0.7%. High demand, low pull: a copy problem, not a demand problem.
- Competitor-custody is the strongest custody signal.Every named-competitor click came at a higher rate than generic custody. This is the most actionable custody intent we have — and the ad group built to capture it served zero impressions.
- Generic custody is real but we're invisible."crypto custody," "crypto custodian," "digital asset custody" — 422 impressions, 0.9% CTR. Unbranded loses 62% of its impressions to rank (top-of-page share just 10%): the ads show too low to be seen.
Live data vs. the Quant forecast
- The forecast.The Quant brief concluded from Ahrefs that "tokenization-issuer terms carry the most search demand — larger than the other four segments combined," led by RWA / private-credit / tokenized-asset terms mapping to AMP.
- The confirmation.Live auction data, four weeks, separate source: tokenization / RWA = 62% of impressions, 4× the next theme. The two datasets — estimated and actual — point the same way. That's about as strong as demand evidence gets.
- What's new here.The Quant brief is a volume forecast. This adds the behavioural layer the auction can't be guessed: brand demand is near-zero and mostly off-target, competitor names out-engage generic custody, and our current keyword build can't actually reach the ICP segments.
How to turn these into a demand engine
Four moves, ranked by what we'd learn
01
Run tokenization as its own discovery test. It's 62% of demand — the highest-information bet available. Give it a dedicated ad group and copy written for RWA / tokenized-issuance intent (AMP), then watch CTR. If it lifts off 1.7%, there's genuine pull and a product story to build; if it doesn't, we stop funding it. Either way we learn something concrete.
02
Rebuild competitor-conquest the way buyers search. Replace "fireblocks qualified custodian" with the real query forms: "fireblocks custody," "bitgo custody," "copper custody," "cobo custody," "ledger enterprise." These already show the best custody CTRs — this tells us how much switching demand we can actually pull.
03
Give each test room to serve. $30/day across six ad groups, on max-clicks, guarantees the ICP groups get nothing. Separate the themes into their own budgets and lift bids/relevance so unbranded stops losing 62% of impressions to rank — otherwise every test starves.
04
Stop the brand leakage and clean the noise. Negative "lugano," "capital partners," "zurich" on brand; negative "stock," "etf," "trump," "news," "price," "jobs" on unbranded. Cheap, immediate, and makes every theme's signal readable.
Methodology & sources
| Source | What we pulled | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ads API | Campaign, ad group, keyword, and search-term reports for the two live Enterprise Search campaigns | Customer 343-926-0341 · window May 5 – 31 2026 (launch to last settled day; Jun 1 excluded as incomplete) |
| Search-term view | 559 reported terms, 3,046 impressions | Google anonymises the low-volume long tail — these are ~half of the 6,238 total impressions, directionally representative |
| Impression-share metrics | Search IS, lost-to-budget, lost-to-rank, top & abs-top IS | Brand IS 72.8% · Unbranded IS 17.4%, 61.9% lost to rank |
| Theme classification | Each search term bucketed by keyword match (tokenization, competitor, custody, brand, wallet) | Buckets are analyst-assigned, not a Google taxonomy |
Read as a demand and engagement signal only — conversions are deliberately out of scope here. Both campaigns currently run Maximize Clicks (no conversion goal), so click behaviour is the cleanest read available this window.