The search market itself is holding up, but competition has stepped up and budgets haven't risen enough to keep pace with the demand that's out there.
Demand in the search market looks healthy. Google Ads, SEO, and Local SEO are all performing well and improving period over period. This isn't a case of customers disappearing.
What changed is the competition. A national chain has scaled up paid search aggressively and now holds roughly half the impression share in our NYC auctions. Meanwhile our budgets are covering only about 30% of available non-brand search demand on average, so as the market got more competitive, we didn't have the budget headroom to capture our share of it.
The core acquisition channels are healthy, and local engagement is trending up.
Start with the foundation, which is solid. Paid search, organic search, and Local SEO are all converting strongly, and the local signals are growing period over period. These are high-intent customers: people actively searching for waxing and choosing a studio.
| Channel | Sessions | Conv. rate | Revenue | Rev. vs prior 30d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads (paid search) | 16,955 | 20.6% | $259,214 | +6% |
| SEO (organic search) | 10,243 | 16.5% | $127,388 | ~flat |
| Local SEO | 4,391 | 15.9% | $54,711 | +4% |
Paid search converts better than 1 in 5 sessions and is the single largest revenue driver. Organic and Local SEO both convert in the mid-teens, which is strong for a business where the conversion is a booked appointment. All three are steady to up on revenue versus the prior 30 days.
The Local SEO signals in particular are pointing up across the NY/NJ studios, and these are the bottom-of-funnel actions that precede a real-world visit:
Growth in directions and call clicks is the clearest evidence that consumer intent in the market is intact. Someone tapping "call" or "directions" is actively trying to get to a studio. A few standouts: Williamsburg directions +89%, Hoboken calls +122%, Columbus Circle profile visits +73%.
Beyond the core channels, several other sources are pulling real weight (site-wide, not NYC-only).
A few things stand out in the broader traffic picture that are worth keeping on the radar:
| Source | Sessions | Conv. rate | Revenue | Rev. vs prior 30d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Untagged links (captured as "Inserted") | 9,074 | ~15% | $89,283 | +3% |
| Other search engines (Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo) | 487 | ~30% | $10,890 | +25% |
| Owned SMS & email (CRM) | 1,002 | ~11% | $5,335 | +5% |
| AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) | 165 | ~11% | $1,307 | +660% |
| Yelp | 123 | ~12% | $1,159 | +79% |
Three takeaways. First, the "Inserted" traffic (a fallback script that labels links arriving without UTM tags) is a quietly major contributor at ~9,000 sessions and nearly $90K in revenue. It's converting well, but it's revenue that should really be credited to the specific campaign that drove it, which is the attribution gap we flag in the recommendations. Second, alternative search engines convert around 30%, higher than any other source, and are up 25% in revenue versus the prior 30 days, a sign the SEO work is paying off across the whole search ecosystem, not just Google. Third, AI assistants like ChatGPT are growing fast as a referral path to the studios. The base is still small, so the +660% should be read as an emerging trend rather than a headline number, but it's a channel we'll keep tracking as it scales.
This is the answer to "did competition increase?", and why it's affecting the business.
You asked whether competition in the area increased. It did, clearly. The Google Ads auction insights for the NYC market show one national competitor now dominating paid search visibility. European Wax Center holds about 50% impression share in the auctions we compete in, well ahead of everyone else, us included.
Search impression share, NYC auctions, last 28 days vs prior. Competitors under 10% shown at floor for scale.
A competitor bidding aggressively across the market does two things: it raises the cost of every impression, and it crowds out visibility, especially in generic, non-brand searches, where a customer is choosing a provider rather than looking specifically for Uni K Wax. That's exactly the moment we'd want to be present, and it's where we're stretched thinnest.
Here's the budget gap in one number. Across our active non-brand search and Performance Max campaigns, we're capturing only about 27% of available impressions, and the rest is lost to budget, not to rank or relevance. 76% of our active NYC campaigns are flagged "limited by budget."
Average non-brand search impression share across active NY/NJ campaigns. The missed share is overwhelmingly budget-limited: demand we could be capturing.
The encouraging part: where we do show up, we win. On branded and high-intent searches we hold ~81% impression share and appear at the top of the page the large majority of the time. The demand is there and our ads perform. We're simply not funding enough of the auction to meet a market that's gotten more competitive.
One thing to be aware of when looking at raw GA4 traffic: the prior period was hit by a bot attack that inflated direct session and new-user counts. That's why a month-over-month comparison of sessions or new users shows a steep drop. It's the bot traffic clearing out of the baseline, not real visitors leaving. The conversion, booking, and impression-share figures in this report aren't meaningfully affected by it, which is why the analysis is built on those instead.