Should You Bid on Your Own Brand in Google Ads? Here’s What I Recommend

Should You Bid on Your Own Brand in Google Ads? Here’s What I Recommend

When it comes to analysing paid Google Ads performance, there’s always been a hot debate around branded search.

Specifically:

Should you include your branded campaigns when reviewing your ROAS? Or exclude them?

I’ll be honest — I’ve always been firmly in the “you should bid on your brand” camp. Because in almost every case I’ve seen, it ends up making more money than not bidding on brand.

But let me break down the nuances of this, because it’s not as black and white as some marketers make it out to be.

First: Let’s Split This Into Search vs Shopping

There’s a key distinction between branded campaigns in Search Ads versus branded campaigns in Shopping Ads.

And how you approach each one is slightly different.

Branded Shopping Ads

With Shopping Ads, I’ve found that allowing your branded Shopping Ads to show up results in a higher overall conversion rate compared to if you excluded brand terms.

Here’s why.

If someone clicks your Branded Shopping Ad, they’ve seen a product they like, they know the price, and they’re taken straight to the product page.

From there, it’s just one or two clicks to complete the purchase. That’s about as efficient as it gets.

Now imagine you exclude branded Shopping traffic. Instead of clicking your Shopping Ad, the customer clicks your branded organic search listing, which typically takes them to your homepage.

That means more clicks to get to the product they originally wanted. Probably one, two, or three extra clicks.

And what happens when you put more clicks between the customer and the buy button? More drop-offs. That’s basic conversion rate optimisation.

More clicks = more opportunities for the customer to get bored, distracted, or change their mind.

So with Branded Shopping Ads, I’m a strong yes, let them run. The smoother path to purchase usually means a higher conversion rate.

Branded Search Ads

With Search Ads, the common pushback I hear is:

“But I’ll get those clicks anyway! They’re searching my brand name, they’ll click the organic link.”

Let’s reframe that.

What you’re really saying here is:

“I believe my branded organic search listing has a 100% click-through rate.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen any marketing channel with a 100% CTR!

You can actually check your own branded organic CTR in Google Search Console.

Branded Search Ads

Head over to the Performance report in Search Console. Filter for your brand name, and you’ll see the impressions, clicks, and resulting CTR.

In my case, for Big Flare, our branded organic CTR is around 20%.

That means 80% of people searching for my brand don’t even click on my website link. Ouch.

To be fair, I think this is partly because my brand name might be getting confused with people looking up solar flares or space events.

Your CTR is probably better. But I’ll bet it’s still nowhere near 100%. Various studies have looked in to this and found the average CTR on branded organic rankings is 30%-60%.

Owning More of Page 1

This is where having both a branded Search Ad and your branded organic listing becomes valuable.

You own more of the first page. More real estate = higher overall CTR.

It’s the same logic behind using every available ad extension (now called “assets”) in your ads. It’s not that the extensions themselves are always amazing, it’s that they help your ad take up more space on the page.

And when you dominate the space, more people click.

I’ve personally seen this time and again across different accounts and industries. It’s one of those truisms in marketing that just tends to hold up: take up more space, get more clicks.

What’s It Worth Though?

So in my opinion, yes, bid on your own brand.

But don’t just ask “does it work?”, ask to what degree does it work?

The real question is: how much incremental value does it bring, and what’s the right amount to pay for that?

Here’s how I handle this:

I always break branded search out into its own campaign.

Then I set an ROAS target of over 1000%.

That way, even if I’m being super conservative and assuming that half of those clicks aren’t incremental, I’m still sitting at a “true” ROAS of around 500%. And that’s still great in most ecommerce businesses.

What About Branded Shopping Campaigns?

You can technically try to split branded traffic out into its own Shopping campaign using keyword exclusions.

But in practice, it’s messy.

There’s always a bit of non-brand traffic bleeding into your brand campaign, and vice versa.

So for Shopping (and Performance Max), I usually don’t bother splitting branded from non-branded.

Instead, I recommend setting a blended ROAS target for the whole campaign.

That blended target should take into account that some of your traffic will be branded, and some non-branded.

If you’re worried about how much brand is making up your Shopping campaigns, you can pull a search term report. That’ll give you an idea of the proportion of branded vs non-branded queries triggering your ads.

Summary of My Approach to Branded Campaigns

To wrap this up, here’s how I think about and handle branded campaigns:

  • Search Ads: Yes, bid on your own brand. Set up a separate campaign, aim for 1000%+ ROAS, knowing that not all clicks are incremental.

  • Shopping / Performance Max: Don’t bother splitting brand and non-brand. Instead, run them together and optimise to a blended ROAS target that accounts for brand traffic.

  • Monitor Your Organic CTR: Use Google Search Console to see your branded organic CTR. It’s never 100%, and that’s why paid brand coverage helps.

  • Take Up More Real Estate: The more of page 1 you own, the higher your overall CTR. This applies to brand terms just as much as anything else.

In most cases, bidding on your own brand makes sense. But the real skill is in setting the right targets, knowing the limits of incrementality, and using data to back up your decisions.