I often see brand campaigns treated as ‘set and forget’, with advertisers focusing their efforts on higher-spending generic campaigns. If this is you, you could be missing a trick. Instead, optimizing your Google Ads bidding strategies for brand campaigns requires a strategic and proactive approach to PPC management.
By experimenting with bidding strategies, you can avoid overpaying for brand traffic while maximizing visibility, which is exactly what we want from brand campaigns. This can significantly impact the results of your campaigns, boosting ROAS and increasing profit.
It's crucial to maximize visibility for brand searches to defend your brand from competitors, manage the narrative through ad copy, and direct users to optimized landing pages. The challenge that advertisers face and something I regularly encounter, is ensuring you don’t overpay for brand traffic. Brand traffic should be relatively cheap and high performing, however, getting the bidding strategy wrong will drive up costs.
This is an often overlooked reason why branded keywords need to be kept separate from generics, through negative keywords and dedicated brand campaigns. Keeping them separate means being able to tailor the strategy and manage each campaign type in the most suitable way.
Another issue that can arise from brand searches appearing in generic campaigns is skewing performance data. Therefore, a secondary benefit from keeping them separate is to clearly understand performance and prevent data from being skewed by high-converting brand traffic, which is typically lower in the funnel.
Notice the difference in brand CPA compared to the generic campaigns, with this level of variance between brand and generics typical of 75% of accounts that I manage.
It’s important that brand searches don’t inflate conversion rates and distort the true CPA and ROAS. This applies to Search, Shopping, and PMax campaigns, where the use of brand negatives should be incorporated into the strategy.
The answer is no—bidding on brand keywords isn’t necessary for all advertisers. If you have no competitors bidding on your brand terms, your organic rankings are strong, or your budget is tight, it may not be the best use of ad spend.
Additionally, a common client concern is: why bid on branded traffic if those users are likely to convert organically? Not bidding on them frees up extra budget for introducing new people to the brand.
While this is a valid point, the counterargument is that paying a small fee ensures users don’t get lost along the way, meaning it’s a small price to pay to ensure you guide them smoothly to conversion.
If brand bidding is part of your strategy, the key is to ensure you're paying as little as possible for this traffic, whilst getting the most out of it. This will allow you to allocate more budget to acquiring new audiences through generic campaigns but it’ll still ensure you reap the benefits of brand bidding.
To achieve this, branded keywords require different bidding strategies compared to generics. While Target CPA or Target ROAS is often ideal for conversion-focused campaigns, other bidding strategies are more suitable for branded traffic, depending on your goals and individual circumstances.
My journey to finding the best bidding strategy for brand campaigns is still ongoing. There are three bid strategies in particular that I find the most successful, although results can differ greatly from one account to the next. This makes it vital that every account manager tests these bid strategies out for themselves to find the perfect solution.
Manual CPC is a favorite in the PPC community when it comes to brand campaigns. It offers advertisers full control over bidding, allowing manual adjustment as required. This strategy can help keep costs low while ensuring you are getting visibility for branded searches.
Monitor and adjust the Max. CPC of each keyword. I like to do this with a view of average CPC and impression share, although it may also be important to factor in conversion metrics as well:
Another thing to keep an eye on is the bid simulator, which shows how performance may differ by altering bids:
If you’re not maximizing Search Impression Share and Max. Bids appear to be high enough, check the campaign isn’t limited by a daily budget.
Brand traffic tends to convert at a higher rate compared to generic keywords, which means Manual CPC can be particularly effective in preventing overspending while still achieving high performance.
Even though Google Reps and the recommendations tab in Google Ads push automated bidding strategies, my recommendation is to ignore them and stick with Manual CPC. It’s the only way to prevent CPC from rising to unnecessary highs, something I’ve experienced numerous times.
Target Impression Share is a fantastic alternative that can work harder than Manual CPC, depending on your objectives. With this strategy, you can aim to capture a specific percentage of the available impressions for branded searches, ensuring your ads appear prominently for those keywords.
My go-to approach to Target Impression Share is to set the target to just below 100%, which is a way to prevent CPCs from spiking, and then use an appropriate Maximum CPC bid limit. Understand the average CPC for brand keywords before setting the bid limit and make sure your limit is higher than this, otherwise delivery may be negatively impacted.
This may not be the right fit for every account, but it’s worth setting up a campaign experiment to see how this bidding strategy performs for you.
To do this, set up a custom campaign experiment and choose the brand campaign as the base campaign. Name the experiment and change the bid strategy in the experiment campaign.
Next, schedule the experiment and decide how much traffic to send to the experiment campaign. I generally choose 50%, unless it’s important to minimize account disruption, in which case I choose 30%.
Give the experiment plenty of time to run and collect as much data as possible and once you are satisfied with the results, or when Google deems the experiment to be statistically significant, analyze the results and decide whether or not to apply Target Impression Share as the bid strategy in the main campaign, or continue using Manual CPC.
The results below show how the experiment for an e-commerce account reduced costs, and increased clicks, however, it also generated fewer conversions and increased CPA. In this instance, we concluded the experiment was unsuccessful due to the importance of generating conversions.
If Target Impression Share does outperform Manual CPC, it can provide the visibility you need without the same hands-on effort required by Manual CPC, and it has been proven to do this at a lower cost, making it an effective alternative to Manual CPC.
Both Target ROAS and Target CPA are the most optimal bid strategies when it comes to conversion-focused generic campaigns. However, I generally avoid these for branded keywords because these strategies can drive up costs.
For brand, they can drive up average CPC, which in turn raises your CPA and decreases ROAS. However, there are specific circumstances where these Maximize Conversions and Maximize Conversion Value might be the best fit for brand campaigns.
If your brand receives a high search volume and you’re unable to capture all of it due to budget constraints, Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value could help focus your spend on the traffic that’s most likely to convert, or high-value customers.
Another scenario whereby these bidding strategies may work hard for brand campaigns is for e-commerce brands that have an enormous catalog of products and the objective is to generate as many sales and revenue. They may also work best for e-commerce brands that have products at a variety of price points.
For example, a homeware brand may sell furniture that costs thousands of dollars, along with accessories that are priced under $20. Using Target CPA and Target ROAS could help better manage brand bids for these different types of products. It’s still possible to do this with Manual CPC, however, if the catalog is large and there are many brand keyword variations, automated bidding may do a better job.
If this is you, set up a custom experiment with these bidding strategies and see what impact this has on costs, traffic and conversions.
I experiment with brand bidding strategies in every account I manage to determine the most optimal strategy for a given account.
For one client, a large online marketplace, experimenting with Target Impression Share resulted in an impressive uplift in results, far outperforming Manual CPC and saving the business thousands whilst driving more conversions.
The experiment took place between 18th April and 31st May, giving it plenty of time to gather a sufficient amount of data. Here are the results:
Taking a closer look at the performance of the campaign more recently, Average CPC has decreased by -74% to £0.04. In my experience, this is exceptionally low and it’s fuelled the large decrease in Cost and Cost per conversion.
From lower costs, conversion rate improved and impression share increased. So overall this experiment has been a large success and it’s enabled us to channel more budget into generic campaigns to grow top-funnel traffic.
Nothing is guaranteed with any of these bidding strategies when it comes to brand campaigns, however, the best thing you can do is experiment. Even if the experiment proves unsuccessful, at least you know you are using the most effective bid strategy for brand.