Brand campaigns: defence or waste?

Brand searches convert several times better than anything else in the account, because the person already knows you. A blended cost per conversion that includes brand describes nothing anyone can grow.

That is why the first step is to split them: one number for brand, what the business already earned, and one for non-brand, what the advertising actually buys.

• Competitors bid on your name. Their ad can sit above your organic result. Your own ad, cheap because it is relevant, keeps the top spot.
• Resellers or booking sites bid on it. Common for hotels and branded products.
• You need control of the message. A sale, a new product, a site that changed address.

Smart Bidding bids to reach its target on average, and on brand most of those conversions were coming anyway. Manual bids, or a target impression share for the top of the page, usually buy the same clicks for less.

Keep brand keywords in their own campaign, with exact match for your name and its common spellings. Keep them out of Performance Max with a brand exclusion, so the credit stays where you can read it.

Where nobody bids on your name, a brand campaign may add little. The honest way to know is a test: pause it in some regions or for some weeks, and watch total conversions, not the brand campaign's own numbers.

The audit shows how much of the budget buys your own name, whether a brand campaign exists at all, judged on keywords rather than campaign names, whether it runs on automated bidding, and whether Performance Max can buy your brand.