Is Bidding on Your Own Brand a Waste of Money?

Your branded campaign shows the highest ROAS, but is it your least incremental channel? 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy unpacks the real truth about brand bidding, attribution vs incrementality, and when branded search in Google Ads is quietly draining profit. 

Learn how to structure brand campaigns correctly, defend against competitors, exclude brand from Performance Max, and run simple incrementality tests to see if you should cut it.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Your branded search campaign in your account probably has the highest rowass, but here's something not many people tell you. It is probably also your least valuable campaign. Some agencies say you should always bid on brand. Others say you should cut brand because it's not incremental. Google says you should always bid on your brand. So, what's actually true? That and more in this episode. Hello everyone and welcome back to Google Ads Unleashed. Hope everyone is doing fabulous this Monday. Another episode, another episode about brand search. This one actually came up in a training that I did yesterday. So, I thought I may as well give a little bit more um sort of uh context on that one and maybe add another episode. episode because I feel maybe from the previous episodes I've told you how to brand search, but I didn't really tell you if to brand search and when to brand search. Right? So, let's first recap quickly what brand search is and how it should normally look like. Right? So, with branded search, I generally mean a search campaign where you bid on your own brand. Typically, I always think of branded search in four categories. So, generic searches such as literally just for your brand. Um then the second type of search that I think of always is um brand plus a product name. So that usually applies to sort of larger businesses when people sort of start knowing your product range or even know the name of your product. Very often makes sense to pop that into its own ad group to make own ads for. The third type is brand plus discount code searches. People look are looking for a discount code for your brand. And then lastly um uh brand plus review or experience searches. Usually, I would recommend popping these four into se or these four types of branded searches in in in their own ad groups with exact and phrase match keywords. Never brought tried this very often. Brought with brand inclusion and some weird s*** that Google recommends. That's not how you do it. Exact and phrase is still uh uh a million times better. And typically, I like to use either manual CPC or target impression. and share um as bid strategies because they uh produce much lower CPCs and it works just a lot better and you waste a lot less money than target raw or max conversions. Sometimes I like starting with max conversions if it's a brand new account but then I typically very quickly revert to to TIS or manual CPC. So got nothing against that uh for a short period of time just to really hammer the account when you brand start an account brand new. But typically those are the bid strategies and that is usually how a brand search looks like its purpose as you know people already know you. They look for your the the the brand and um you capture them there. Right. I want to now um talk about a little bit um what many people get wrong when they when they run these campaigns because you could follow every best practice that I've just mentioned to you and still make a lot of mistakes. For instance, one of the biggest misconceptions that I feel out there is that people think branded search is always incremental. There's a massive difference between um organics um sorry uh between um attribution and actual incrementality. I've talked about this in many other episodes already. Um attribution is simply the art of um trying to ate a value to a touch point within your conversion journey. Um, incrementality on the other hand measures whether the touch points that you generated with your marketing actually meaningfully contributed to the sale or whatever you me trying to measure the lead that occurred. And brand search is one of them examples which has high attribution typically because it produces a superb rowass um but has very low increment. ality, right? So, it could show a OS of 20, but in reality, for every pound that you put in, you might be losing 90 p, right? Uh, so this is two entirely different things. And sometimes you get the opposite with other campaign types, right? So, demand gen for instance, some very often has extremely poor um attribution numbers, right? And low rowass and everything, but very high incrementality because you measure you generate sales which you can't really measure, right? Because people might be seeing your YouTube ads and then clicking on your brand search. So brand search would show high measurement uh at attribution rorowass whereas in reality it only sucked up the sale that was generated by demand gen in the first place. Okay. So that is what many many people get wrong. Right? So they think that branded search is pretty much always incremental but very Often what happens is when you cut branded search is that people click on the organic search result anyway and uh in the end um you you can uh sort of uh yeah very easily rid of it. Okay. On the flip side many people sort of um then hear this and think oh yeah I can cut my brand search and then uh just cut it straight away. And that is the mistake number two to cut brand search entirely without actually understanding when it is needed. Okay. So, for instance, what um what when it it could be needed is with brand new accounts. Okay. If you have new accounts, very low conversion volume. All right. So, let's say you kick kickstarting a completely new account. You're already running meta ads. They're kind of working and then you want to give your Google Ads account a kickstart. I always recommend bidding on your brand at the beginning because you basically fuel your ad account with people who are interested in your brand. As you Our branded search converts really highly and it's usually people who are literally our ICP. So our ideal customer profile. So if they search for your brand and you pay only a couple of quid to fill your pipeline with these types of people, well hurrah, your ad account learns a lot faster and your non-brand campaigns work a lot better. Okay, so that's really something that um I highly recommend with new accounts. So don't just cut brand there. keep it running until you can have a non-brand infrastructure which really runs well and which does its own thing and where you have a precedent or a very good reason to actually cut brand search. Okay. The second reason um why I would never cut brand or when I would never cut cut brand search is when competitors are bidding on your brand. Okay, this sometimes happens without them wanting to do it. Right? So, for instance, their PMAX campaigns are simply um playing out search ads on your brand name and your competition might not even do it deliberately, right? It's just their PMAX campaigns doing wild stuff. Sometimes they are doing it deliberately and sometimes they're doing it with a better offer. I've talked about this in a previous episode where a client came to us at the beginning of February because their January has been really poor and what had happened was their meta ads were actually doing better. near, but it showed that they were doing worse. And the reason for that is is that a lot of generated interest in branded search actually landed with competition because the competitor illegally, by the way, uh used their brand name in the ad, which they shouldn't have done. Um so, um they they obviously got penalized for that, but they actually had a better offer and they lost about 2,000 customers um in January alone because they they lost all those warm buyers to their competitor, right? So there it can be really really helpful to keep an eye on it. Sometimes there are some other really comp competitive industries where for instance in SAS as well, so software as a service where when you search for branded search, that's very often some of the only uh real um uh volume that people can bid on. A good example, if you search for email marketing um sort of software or something like that. I bet you any money that has a lot less volume than for instance Mailchimp or Clavio, right? So if people search for Clavio, you will see other competitors um with landing pages saying stuff like why uh Send Rail is better or whatever the the hell they're called, right? So you can really lose um your traffic there. So that's when you should actively defend your brand with a good strategy. The second reason when you why uh cutting brand completely can be a massive mistake is that you lose ad copy control right so your organic search result usually goes to your homepage and that's the end of it and that's not always a really good strategy what we did with AG1 for instance when we were running their ads they had a fantastic new customer offer so we sent the branded traffic to their new customer offer page right and um that it really worked well So, and that was more incremental, right? Because we were able to actually not only convert people better than on a organic search result, but we were also um generating for how little we paid so much more revenue per new customer because that new customer offer had a much higher AOV. So, you could do other things such as offer free shipping, uh show your reviews, your USPs, your pushing the bundles, offers, urgency that control matter. and it can make a difference. Okay, so the third mistake a lot of people make is that they don't exclude brand from other campaigns. Okay, especially performance max campaigns. That happens a lot. I see this so often that I've I don't I've lost count how often I I've heard that. So people don't exclude their own brand on Pmax. So that targets branded uh search terms. Then they say, "Oh, Pmax is working really well." They try to push, suddenly it falls off a cliff and then they don't understand what's going on. It inflates the performance of the campaign and it does not work when you mix brand and non-brand. Okay, it also screws you with your actual search campaigns, right? With your branded search campaigns. So, you have to properly exclude brand from all of the campaigns and go and listen to my episode about how to set up a proper brand and non-brand split with Pmax and shopping. That is something that um I feel is good. Then um another mistake that people make is to set the uh branded search campaigns up like they would set up non-brand. Right? I've already talked about sort of broad um I talked about um target rowass and what kind of bid strategies you should be using. A lot of people make that mistake. Um go and listen back to the episode of how to set up a brand search or go back to number one where the reason how to run brand search when uh about 10 minutes early into this episode. Okay, so that's a mistake I see time and time again that people, you know, chuck in broad match uh keywords for the target raw as well. That does not work and it wastes a ton of money. All right. Um then something that I'm see people making a big mistake and that is actually the the last mistake is that people do not test regularly whether they're branded search is incremental now you don't have to design a very complicated hold out test or something like that right it's much easier if you just have a look at for instance a um a geo hold out right you can pause brand in one region that may be big and important to you if you have enough data and see what happens but you could also just switch off branded search completely if no competitor or anything is bidding on it now uh today when this episode comes out is an idea real time, test it through the entirety of March and just see what happens. Okay. Um uh does for instance total revenue drop? If it doesn't drop whatsoever, then fine. Does organic search actually increase bizarrely by the same number of clicks that you would normally get through your branded search? Well, then very likely um um the people are just clicking the organic search result and that's it. Measure that regularly and go back to the episode of of um how to set up an incrementality test. And it is absolutely um uh something that you should do at least once a year because if you don't test that regularly, you may be just throwing money out the window even if it's just a few hundred euros or dollars or whatever per month. But it's just one of them things that you want to really test regularly. Okay, so Sumarum, when is branded search worth it? Um it makes sense when you have aggressive competitors bidding on you. Uh it sometimes makes sense during sort of like Black Friday and big sales when you're scaling aggressively because you want to control the messaging in the ad. Okay, it sometimes makes sense when you want to have message control for instance if you have a new customer offer bundle that you want to send people to. Sometimes it makes sense if you if that's your strategy which would you just want to defend more um real estate on the search engine ranking page. Um or sometimes your ranking is uh is strong for instance right if you got a brand new ad account or uh or brand new brand sorry and sometimes you've got a completely new ad account and there again it makes sense to kickstart your ad account with brand but further down the line it I would always ask is it incremental enough to justify the cost that I am spending so brand search isn't good or bad um there's no one fit for all it's super powerful but if you don't understand and when to use it or what you should be doing with it. It'll either inflate your ego and look very good in the ad account or it's going to quietly drain your profit. And I've seen ad accounts throw away dozens and dozens of thousands um per year on brand search which was not incremental. And if you need an expert opinion on that then just message me. Um you can find me on LinkedIn Jeremy and Google Ads. You can also find me um via email jeremy digital.mmarketing or you can book a one-to-one call with me um uh at youngandigitalmarketing.com. The second uh quarter of the year is soon upon us at uh beginning of April. Um we have opened our doors for more one-to-one coaching. If you are um interested in taking your Google ad strategy to the next level, please be in touch. Um otherwise, I will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening. This has been Jeremy Young, your personal Google expert and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.