Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 113 - Branded Searches

Should you be bidding on your own brand name in Google Ads? 

This is one of the most controversial Google Ads topics. So of course, we are tackling it head on today.

While of course it depends, in this episode I'm telling you exactly what it depends on so you can put forth the best strategy for your PMax Search and Shopping campaigns.

We're covering targeting, bidding, and what you need to know to maximize or minimize the branded opportunity in your Google Ads account.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads: Episode 113, Branded Search.

First thing’s first, should you even be paying for ads when people are searching for your brand on Google?

And I'm not talking about how you feel about this. I can guess how you feel about having to pay the "brand tax," but does it make sense to do?

Rather than just sharing my opinion, I wanted to share some data with you from a company called Haus who actually studied this. What they found supported my opinion. 

What they found is that if there's a lot of auction pressure, meaning there are a lot of other people competing for your brand name, then yes, you're going to want to advertise there. Whereas, if there's not a lot of auction pressure, meaning your competitors are not bidding on your brand, then you probably don't need to either.

Specifically, they looked at whether having a Branded Search campaign provided incremental lift, actual value to your business. 

In auctions where there was a lot of competition, 82% of brands saw incrementality from advertising on their brand. But in auctions where there was not a lot of competition, only 35% of brands saw incrementality from advertising on their brand. That's still one third of brands, by the way.

So here's how you're going to decide. Go to Insights and Reports, Auction Insights, and see if you have any competitors there. If it's just you and maybe one or two other people with less than 10% Impression Share on your brand, then you probably don't need to be running a brand campaign. But if you see a lot of competitors there, say at least five different domains or at least two domains with at least 20% to 30% Impression Share, then you are going to want to advertise on your brand because if you don't, it's going to make your brand CPCs much cheaper for those competitors. And they are going to steal a ton from the bottom of your funnel. When you've already spent so much time and effort making people aware who you are and liking you so much that they're going to Google and searching for you, it is a shame to lose them at the last minute over pennies. 

So when in doubt, do advertise on your brand. If you're not sure, check your auction insights in your brand campaign to get an idea of auction pressure. If auction pressure is high, keep that campaign going. If auction pressure is low, consider pausing.

Remember, you do not want to go to Google and search for your brand to find out if people are advertising on your brand because Google Search results are personalized. And you know what? Google doesn't want to show you an ad for your brand because Google knows that you constantly visit your own website and you never convert there. So the best way to check this is to actually go to Auction Insights so you get a data-backed understanding of what's happening in the auction.

If you are not currently bidding on your brand name and therefore you don't have these auction insights, I recommend running a one month test with a Branded Search campaign just so you can gather that data and see, are you right to not advertise there? Or do you need to start to fend off those competitors?

Now, let's talk about PMax because a Branded Search campaign isn't the only thing that could be advertising on your brand. There's also branded searches that could be coming into your Shopping campaigns and branded searches that are most definitely coming into PMax.

When in doubt, I recommend leaving your brand in PMax.

Why is that? Well, when you're just starting a PMax campaign, the key thing it needs to work is data, conversion data, and branded searches, whether for Shopping or Search, convert well. So keep it in there so your PMax can get that conversion data and start really learning which assets work well and which audiences work well and all those important signals that the Smart bidding and Optimized Targeting need.

If you check your Performance Max search terms and you see that you're spending a lot of money on brand and you want to exclude it, fine. But just remember, something else PMax is helpful for is a single PMax campaign can show Search and Shopping ads out of the same campaign. So if you exclude your brand from PMax, you need to make sure you then have dedicated Search and dedicated Shopping campaigns to capture that brand demand.

I see so many e-commerce advertisers forget about the shopping portion. So you'll have a Branded Search campaign, but guess what's above Search? Products. People are searching for your brand and the first thing they see is a whole bunch of competitor products. You don't want that. And then it becomes a decision of what products we want to show when people are searching for our brand and how we should implement a Branded Shopping campaign since you don't get to the keywords. So honestly, it can sometimes just be easier to leave it in PMax.

What if you already have a Branded Search campaign, PMax campaign—maybe you're not an e-commerce advertiser, so there's no shopping—and you see brand searches coming into both, then what do you do?

This is such a common problem that when Fred Vallaeys of Optmyzr joined the Monthly Meet for my Inside Google Ads course members recently, he was talking to us about vibe coding and writing your own scripts, and he asked what a common challenge was. So I said exactly this, being able to check the search terms in PMax, Search, and Shopping for overlap. And Fred being Fred, went away and created a script just for us that checks exactly that. So if you have not yet joined my Inside Google Ads course, here is one more reason to go today to grab that search term overlap script to ensure you're not duplicating effort.

You can check that out at learn.jyll.ca. That's learn dot J-Y-L-L dot C-A.

What happens if you find that brand specifically is doing this? 

I just look at how it's performing. Not just from a CPC perspective, but from the CPA or ROAS perspective. Is the PMax brand performing better or is the Search Brand performing better? Sometimes it's one, sometimes the other. And I'll generally just recommend my clients go with it. Whatever's working best, go with it. Don't try to fight it unless there's a specific reason you need to do so.

Because remember, when PMax is advertising on your branded searches, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, finding the people who are most likely to drive the performance you're looking for.

Maybe your concern isn't actually advertising on your brand. Maybe you're worried that PMax is focusing too much on people who are your existing customers. So a way to fight that rather than excluding your brand would be to use new customer acquisition goals. Or maybe your ROAS target in PMax is so high, all it can do is advertise on your brand. So the solution may be to just lower your ROAS target so that it can afford to go out and find other searches. 

Look for the root cause of the issue in PMax or any campaign type before trying to do a heavy-handed solution like completely excluding all brand.

If you do exclude a brand from PMax either via brand exclusions or negative keywords or both, make sure you're capturing that demand elsewhere unless you've determined that there's no competition at all and you really don't need to.

Last but not least, make sure you keep the variants of your brand in mind. 

For example, people searching for reviews. “is this legit?,” comparing it to competitors, that's a huge one. If people are searching your brand versus brand B ,or which is better, brand B, your brand. You want to make sure you're controlling the narrative on those terms. Those aren't quite competitor searches because they're not directly searching for a competitor and they're not quite brand searches because they're not directly searching for you. 

So if you see these kinds of things in your Search Term Report, it might be a good idea to start a whole separate campaign to really address that intent and help people decide which is better for them. Yes, this is allowed. Yes, you can use those competitor names in your ad text in this way, because you're not trying to say that you are brand B. You're making very clear you're brand A and you're providing information about brand A versus brand B.

Of course, you should consult a lawyer if you're not sure, but in the US and in Canada, this is completely allowed and recommended if that's the information people are searching for and what they need to know before they can potentially buy from you.

And last but not least, bidding. This is another one of my unpopular opinions in the industry, but I stand by it. You should probably use Smart bidding for your brand campaigns.

I know, I know, general advice is to use manual CPC to make sure you don't overpay. But what I don't understand is how for all of your campaigns, you want Google to focus on conversions. And then when it comes to your brand, suddenly you only care about clicks?

Here's the scenario that sold me on this. I have one client whose brand name is essentially the generic name of their industry; it would be like if their business was called 'Pizza Restaurant.'

Their Branded Search campaign was on manual CPC and had a low cost-per-click, but it didn't perform the way a branded campaign should. Even though they were using an exact match keyword, there were many bloated “other” search terms, which was strange. The CTR was around 15%, and the conversion rate was barely better than non-brand search because Google was simply trying to find the cheapest possible clicks that matched 'Pizza Restaurant.' They weren't actually a pizza restaurant, I'm just using that as an example, so my recommendation was to switch to Target ROAS. And we set the Target ROAS I believe at around 400%.

Overnight, this campaign changed. The impressions went way down. Clicks went way down. But click-through rate went up to the 30s and 40s, which is what we expect from branded search. Conversion rates skyrocketed, total conversion volume from the campaign went up, and, of course, ROAS went up as well. By focusing this brand campaign on branded searches, targeting people who are likely looking for this pizza restaurant and not any pizza restaurant, or Apple the company and not apple the fruit, it was able to pull in all these other signals, in addition to just the search query, to achieve that and those other search terms went down to near zero.

So look, if your goal is truly just visibility, maybe you have a ton of competitors and you just want to make sure you're at the top of that SERP, then fine. In Search, pick Target Impression Share for your brand. And in Shopping, pick Max Clicks.

But usually for my clients, I recommend starting your Branded Search campaigns on Max conversions before moving to Target CPA or Target ROAS. And I recommend starting your Branded Shopping campaigns on Target ROAS. 

Because that's actually how I like to do a Branded Shopping campaign. Rather than trying to play negative whack-a-mole or use one of those scripts that adds every search term except for your brand as a negative, you know me by now we lead from the front.  If you set up a Shopping campaign, but put a Target ROAS of 400% or 500%, that means that the only queries that could achieve that are your brand. You are leading from the front with the automation so that it becomes a Branded Shopping campaign rather than playing whack-a-mole from the back trying to force it into submission as a Branded Shopping campaign.

Brand settings like brand inclusions and exclusions are available for Search and PMax. As of right now they are not on Shopping. Huge missed opportunity if any Google product leads are listening, but you can read more about that in my Search Engine Land article about brand settings, which I've linked in the episode description.

To wrap us up today, should you be bidding on your brand and how should you do so?

If there are other companies that are bidding on your brand, then yes, you should be there in Search and if applicable in Shopping. If there is no one else bidding on your brand, then you don't need to be there. But if it's only going to cost you an extra couple of bucks a month, I still think it might be worth it.

Should you let PMax cover that demand or have dedicated campaigns? When you're just starting, let PMax take it all. And then you can look at performance and at budget allocation, and decide if you think it makes sense to break branded search and if applicable Branded Shopping into their own campaigns or to keep things simple and have PMax cover it all. It really depends on your budget. Larger budgets may mean separate campaigns. Your skills and ability to manage it on an ongoing basis. If you're a busy business owner, probably leave it to PMax. If you're an agency or freelancer, you may have the time and skills to break it out.

And finally, try target-based Smart bidding for your Brand campaigns, for PMax of course, but also for branded shopping and branded search, if you want to lead from the front to create these brand campaigns, rather than trying to play constant whack-a-mole from the back.

And if you need a little help setting up all the different campaign types and features I've discussed today, it's all covered and so much more in my Inside Google Ads course. You can learn more at learn.jyll.ca. That's learn dot J-Y-L-L dot C-A.

Be sure to subscribe or follow if you're not already. Our next episode is going to be all about that dreaded learning period. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.