Don’t let Brand Search subsidize your losers

When it comes to Paid Search, most Brands will see the majority of their sales come from their branded search terms.

The bigger the Brand, the more sales will come from branded search vs non-brand search.

Brand Performs Really Well

Your branded search will always perform really really well. Low cost of acquisition, high return on ad spend, super profitable.

Search volume is limited however: There’s only so many people looking for your brand.

Also: Spending money on your own brand terms won’t help grow your brand — all the people searching for your already know about you (obviously).

Branded Search: Cheap and profitable

Non-Brand Performs Poorly

Generally, non-branded searches will perform poorly — high cost of acquisition, low return on ad spend, and not profitable.(Exceptions apply if you are the market leader in a specific niche or if you have a clear technical advantage in a specific niche.)

The upside is that there is a huge amount of search volume for non-branded searches, so if you can convert non-branded search profitably, you can grow your brand.

Non-Branded Search: Expensive and break-even at best

Don’t mix
Winners with Losers

So what happens if you mix both Brand and Non-Brand into a single campaign? Google will leverage the performance of your Brand search terms, and spend all those profits on your non-branded search terms.

Cheap & Profitable + Expensive & Unprofitable = Mediocre

So a blended campaign will have “ok” performance. But if you look under the hood, you’ll see that all the revenue is coming from your Branded terms, while all the money is being spent on your non-branded terms.

This happens even if you set a reasonable ROAS target.

  • Always separate Brand from Non-Brand
  • Exclude your Brand from Performance Max
  • Exclude Brand Revenue from Digital Ad Performance Reporting

Exclude Brand from PMax

Always exclude your Branded search terms from your Pmax campaigns. Otherwise your Branded search revenue will subsidize all the shitty inventory Google is feeding you, and PMax will appear to perform well, when it’s actually wasting your money.

Sales from Brand searches are NOT incremental sales

I think we can all agree that when someone searches for “www.YourDomain.com”, that they are going to visit your website regardless of if you are running Google ads or not.

The same can be said for most of your Branded search (usually). In tests I’ve previously run, turning off all branded search ads still resulted in 95% of the traffic (and sales) arriving at the brand’s site. So the revenue generated by Branded search is not really incremental to your business (you would have gotten those sales anyway via direct or organic)

So be very careful about how much you are spending on Branded search.

Don’t overspend on Brand

Set CPC bit limits

If you use automated bidding with Branded search, you either need to set CPC bid limits, or you need to set a super aggressive ROAS target.

Because branded search is so good, there’s lots of room for Google to waste money without it affecting overall campaign performance.

It’s not uncommon to have Google pay $50/click on your domain name. So create a custom bid strategy with a fixed CPC bid limit.

  • Use a Custom Bid Strategy with a max CPC bid limit

Exclude Brand Revenue from Digital Marketing performance

When reporting on your digital marketing performance, DON’T include branded search revenue. This is revenue that would normally appear from direct or organic traffic.

If you are using an agency, make sure your agency isn’t including branded search revenue in their performance reports.

  • DO NOT include Brand revenue in reporting
  • DO include Brand cost in reporting

Without Brand, Google’s performance kinda sucks

For most Brands, once you exclude Branded search revenue from Google Ads, the results kinda suck.

But the sucky part is where the opportunity lies: Converting non-brand organic searches is the key to grow your Brand on Google. It’s how you get your product into the hands of previously brand-unaware users.

Assuming you have a good product that doesn’t suck, your non-brand sales will lead to Brand growth and more brand searches in the future.

But you need to be smart about it.