Bidding on your own brand: when it pays and how to prove it

Every Google Ads account has one campaign nobody questions: brand. Low CPCs, very high conversion rates, double-digit ROAS. It is also the campaign on which a sharp finance director asks the most awkward question: these people were already searching for us by name, so why are we paying for them?

The answer is neither "always" nor "never". It depends on who else appears on your results page, how solid your organic listing is, and what each conversion that would not have happened without the ad actually costs. Below is the full reasoning, and a way to stop arguing about it on opinion alone.

The real question: how incremental is it

A click on a brand ad has two possible stories. In the first, without the ad the user would have clicked your organic result just below: you paid for a click you already owned. In the second, without the ad they would have clicked a competitor, a comparison site or a reseller, or not clicked at all: that click is incremental. The Google Ads report does not tell the two stories apart. It counts both as conversions.

Public data on this is scarce and dated, but it points clearly in one direction. Google research published in 2012, based on hundreds of studies in which ads were paused, estimated that when the advertiser holds the top organic position on average 50% of ad clicks are incremental, against 82% with an organic listing in positions two to four and 96% below position four. The study covers searches in general, not only brand queries, but the mechanism is the same: the stronger your organic listing, the more your ad buys back traffic you already had.

On the other side sits the experiment published by eBay researchers in 2015: when ads on brand keywords were switched off, traffic moved almost entirely to organic results, and the short-term benefit of brand ads was not measurable. Read it carefully, though: eBay was an extremely well-known brand, with a dominant organic listing on its own brand searches. It is the case most favourable to switching off, not the rule.

Competitors on your brand and space on the page

The strongest reason to bid on your brand is that somebody else already is. The Auction insights report for the brand campaign shows who appears on your searches and how often. If a competitor holds meaningful impression share on your name, switching the campaign off hands them the top position above your organic result, right in front of someone who was looking for you.

Even without direct competitors, the brand results page is more crowded than it looks:

• Resellers, marketplaces and aggregators selling your products or services and buying your name to capture the transaction, sometimes on a commission you pay.
• Affiliates bidding on the brand in order to claim the sale.
• Google features such as AI Overviews and product panels, which push the first organic result further down. We cover this in our analysis of AI Overviews and paid CTR.

Then there is control of the message. An ad lets you choose the landing page, the sitelinks, the current promotion, the copy. Organic shows whatever Google decides to show. For a launch, a seasonal push or a reputational issue, that difference is worth something even when pure incrementality is low.

How brand inflates ROAS and pollutes automation

The most underrated damage from brand traffic is not the cost; it is what it does to your numbers. An example with hypothetical but realistic figures:

A blended ROAS of 4.7 looks excellent. But if only 20% of brand revenue is incremental, the revenue advertising actually generated is €8,000 + €54,000 = €62,000, and the account’s incremental ROAS is 3.1. Anyone setting budgets from the 4.7 is overstating the return by more than 50%.

The problem gets worse with Performance Max and AI Max. Left unconstrained, both will happily pick up brand searches, because they convert well and cost little. The result is a "prospecting" campaign reporting a brilliant ROAS built partly on customers who were already looking for you, and an algorithm that learns to chase exactly that kind of traffic.

The tools to prevent it exist:

• Brand lists and brand exclusions at campaign level, for Performance Max and for Search campaigns using broad match or AI Max. In Performance Max the exclusion applies to Search, Shopping and YouTube search inventory, with an option to keep Shopping ads running on excluded searches.
• Brand inclusions in the brand campaign itself, if it uses broad match or AI Max, to keep it on brand searches only.
• Exact match keywords in the brand campaign: when a query is identical to an exact match keyword in a Search campaign, that campaign takes priority over Performance Max.
• Brand negative lists in generic campaigns, for misspellings and variants the exclusions miss, as explained in our guide to negative keyword governance.

The rule is simple: brand lives in one campaign, with its own budget and objective, and is reported separately. Everything else in the account is judged net of brand.

Which bidding strategy to use on brand

On brand the optimisation question differs from the rest of the account: you are not trying to find conversions, you want to be present at the lowest possible cost. Three sensible options:

Target impression share, with the handbrake on

This is the most common choice and a reasonable one, on one condition: always set a maximum CPC bid limit. The strategy pursues the share you ask for, not cost per conversion. If a competitor starts attacking you hard and you have asked for 95% at the absolute top of the page with no cap, the system will raise bids to hold it. Start from the top of the page rather than the absolute top, and a target such as 90% rather than 100%: the last slice of share is almost always the most expensive.

Manual CPC or Maximise clicks with a cap

On a campaign with few terms and predictable behaviour, manual control remains legitimate. It gives you a stable, readable cost, which also helps during an incrementality test.

Target ROAS or CPA: little point

On a campaign that by definition converts at very high levels, a ROAS or CPA target constrains almost nothing and can leave the system room to raise CPCs. And if the brand campaign shares a portfolio strategy with non-brand campaigns, its high ROAS "funds" more aggressive bids elsewhere, masking their true performance.

How to run a brand holdout test

The only serious way to answer the opening question is to switch brand off somewhere and watch what happens. The design we use:

1. Choose test areas. Split the market into groups of regions with similar brand volumes and correlated historical trends. In one group pause the brand campaign (via location exclusion); in the other leave it running.
2. Measure all of brand, not just paid. The metric is total conversions from brand searches: ads, organic, direct. The paid and organic report, available once Search Console is linked to Google Ads, and sales data by area are your foundation.
3. Run it long enough. Four to six weeks at minimum, away from seasonal peaks and promotions, because the differences you are looking for are small and brand search is noisy.
4. Watch Auction insights in the switched-off areas. If a competitor fills the space you vacated, that is part of the result, not noise.
5. Calculate cost per incremental conversion, not the campaign’s CPA.

If volume is too low for a geographic test, an alternating-period test (one or two weeks on, one or two off, repeated several times) is less clean but better than nothing. And when interpreting the figures, remember that data-driven attribution credits the brand campaign even when the final brand search is just the last step of a journey that began elsewhere; the topic is covered in our article on data-driven attribution.

Trademarks: the basic rules

Many brand discussions begin with "a competitor is using my name; isn’t that illegal?". Google Ads rules in brief, always to be checked against the official policy page:

• Keywords. In general Google does not investigate or restrict the use of trademarks as keywords. In the European Economic Area and EFTA countries, following a complaint, it may carry out a limited investigation into whether the combination of keyword and ad text is confusing as to the origin of the goods.
• Ad text. A trademark owner can file a complaint asking for use of the mark in other advertisers’ ad text to be restricted. There are exceptions, for example for resellers and informational sites that meet certain requirements.
• Authorisations. The owner can authorise specific accounts (partners, resellers, agencies) to use the mark in ad text even after a complaint.

In plain terms: the policy mainly protects ad text, not the keyword. A competitor can almost always appear on a search for your name. That is why your main defence is your own presence in the auction, not a complaint. For genuine legal questions, the reference point is a lawyer, not Google Ads support.

The decision framework

A brand campaign is neither waste nor a safe harbour. It is insurance, and like any insurance it needs pricing. In our free audits we always separate brand from everything else before passing judgement on an account. You can see how we work, and the answers to the questions we get most often in the site’s FAQ.