Bidding on branded keywords: Should you pay for searches you might already own?

Few things will make a marketing leader stare suspiciously at a Google Ads report quite like seeing how much money you spent last month bidding on your own name.

It’s like your own personally branded money pit.

Because your team spent years building the brand. You invested in creative, paid social, email, influencers, partnerships, PR, SEO, and approximately 4,235 other things to get people to know you exist. Someone finally goes to Google and types your company name into the search bar, presumably because they already know who you are.

And now you have to pay to make sure that you come up for your own name? 

This is a business blog, so I can’t throw out the expletives I’m sure you’re also thinking of right now. But just know that I see you. I hear you. I swear with you.

This is the blatantly annoying tension behind bidding on branded keywords, particularly for high-growth ecommerce brands spending serious money on customer acquisition. Branded search campaigns tend to perform beautifully. Click-through rates can be strong, conversion rates can be fantastic, and your ROAS could be making everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Go deeper: Landing page optimization strategies to increase conversions (a practical, data-driven guide)

But those numbers can also seduce you with distorted (but quite flattering) versions of reality. 

Someone searching specifically for your brand is fundamentally different from someone searching for the category you sell in and choosing you among several options. One is existing demand arriving at your doorstep, and the other is demand you still have to win.

That doesn’t mean you should stop bidding on branded keywords. There are plenty of situations where doing so is definitely the smart move. But you also need to understand what you’re buying, what specifically you’re protecting your brand from, and how much of that revenue would have found you anyway.

So, should you bid on your own branded keywords?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. 

Sometimes… kind of. 

Let’s talk about it.

Why do brands bid on their own keywords?

Branded keyword bidding is almost always about control.

When you run the ad, you get another highly visible piece of real estate on a search results page for someone who is already looking for you. You can control the message, send the searcher to a specific landing page, highlight a promotion, feature a particular product category, and use assets to give them additional routes into your site.

That can be particularly valuable during a launch or major promotional period.

Go deeper: Is there such a thing as too many keywords with Google Ads? (benchmarks + examples)

If someone searches your brand during Black Friday, do you really want to put all of your faith in the Great Google Gods to decide that your homepage title and meta description are the perfect introduction to your offer. When you put that in your control by bidding on a branded keyword, your branded ad will say exactly what you want it to say and direct your potential holiday shoppers exactly where you want them to go.

Then there’s also another thing you need to think about:

The sneaky strategies of your competitors.

That’s right.

Your competitors aren’t here to play fair, but you know this

Like you, they’re here to get those sweet dollar dollar bills from the very same shoppers you’re trying to target. 

And I’m sure you’ve already seen it happen. 

In fact, just yesterday, I was searching for an obscenely fuzzy and egregiously sized blanket from a specific brand. After being stalked by them relentlessly by paid social ads on TikTok for weeks, I was finally ready to cave.

I’m a weak woman with simple needs. You already know this.

But when I searched for their brand on Google, two of their competitors were at the top of the list in paid spots. 

Here’s where things get spicy.

• Fact: I searched for a particular brand on purpose.
• Also fact: I clicked on a competitor ad. I bought from them instead.

Sure, I started particular brand in mind.

But they were still pretty new to me, and I only searched them because I’d been targeted with a bunch of ads. But being targeted a bunch doesn’t create immediate brand loyalty, right? On top of that, their competitor had a better deal and free shipping. They also had a better color selection, and I knew I didn’t need another navy blue blanket in my life.

And just like that, a branded keyword bid from a competitor stole my dollars from the brand that got me searching in the first place.

Go deeper: Which attributes describe a good landing page experience? (+ examples)

That doesn’t automatically mean you need to defend every branded search term, no matter the cost. But it does mean you should know if your competitors are bidding to make sure they’re ranking when someone searches specifically for you.

Google’s Auction Insights reporting can help here. You can see which advertisers are entering the same auctions, how frequently their ads overlap with yours, and how often they appear above you. Impression share data can also show how much eligible visibility you’re actually capturing. 

If nobody is competing aggressively on your brand and your organic result dominates the page, the economics of branded bidding may look very different than they would for a brand whose competitors are circling its search results like extremely well-funded vultures.

The big problem with branded search: it can make your paid media look amazing

This is where I want high-growth marketing leaders to be particularly careful.

Branded search is often some of the highest-converting traffic in a Google Ads account.

Of course it is.

These people searched for you.

They may have seen six Meta ads, opened three emails, watched a creator review your product, read a Reddit thread, visited your website twice, abandoned a cart, received an SMS, talked to their sister about it over brunch, and finally searched your brand name on Google when they were ready to buy.

They’re primed and they’re also likely closer to making a purchase than if they were searching for more broad, educational terms. 

Go deeper: 8 landing page best practices to increase conversions (+ video)

Where you can get into trouble if you start lumping your performance numbers all together. 

Imagine your branded campaign is generating a 14X ROAS while your non-branded acquisition campaigns are generating a 2.5X ROAS. Take an average across those groups and suddenly your Google Ads account looks much healthier than the part of the account responsible for finding new demand actually is.

I’m not saying the 14X ROAS is a fake number. It’s absolutely real. But if you aren’t evaluating branded and non-branded campaigns separately, you will not see the true ROAS for when you’re going to market to acquire new customers.

Google itself provides reporting that lets advertisers examine paid and organic performance together, including what happens when both a paid ad and an organic listing appear for related queries. 

For growth leaders, this is why I would never evaluate branded search purely by asking, “What’s the ROAS?”

I’d want to know what happens to total demand when we change the paid presence.

Are you protecting demand or paying twice for it?

This is really the question we’re asking ourselves when having this debate. Let’s say 10,000 people search for your brand this month. You run branded ads, generate thousands of clicks, and Google Ads attributes a large pile of revenue to the campaign.

Great job, team. Now, let’s turn the branded ads OFF. 

What happens next?

• Do those people simply click your organic listing instead?
• Do competitors capture some of them?
• Does total site traffic decline?
• Does revenue change?
• Does paid traffic fall while organic traffic rises by roughly the same amount?

See what I’m getting at?

Go deeper: How to find negative keywords for Google Ads campaigns (+ examples)

If turning branded ads off causes 90% of those clicks to migrate peacefully into organic search with no meaningful change in sales, paying for all of them becomes harder to justify. On the other hand, if turning them off causes competitors to gain visibility, total clicks to fall, and revenue to decline, the branded campaign was doing real defensive work.

This is why I’m wary of universal declarations like “You should always bid on your brand” or “Bidding on your own name is a waste of money.”

And where you have enough volume to run a meaningful test, test it. Google Ads supports controlled campaign experiments, and Google’s own measurement guidance recommends looking at paid, organic, and combined traffic rather than judging changes solely within the paid channel. 

Your branded campaign should have to prove its keep just like everything else.

When bidding on branded keywords makes sense

Now, are there situations where I’m comfortable doing branded keyword bid strategies? You betcha.

Competitor pressure is the obvious one, which we talked about, right? If other brands are actively bidding on your name, abandoning the paid portion of the SERP means voluntarily giving them highly valuable real estate in front of people who specifically asked for you. Or, more simply, they’ll buy their blankets from someone else.

Promotions are another. If you’re running a major sale, product launch, seasonal campaign, or limited-time offer, branded ads give you much greater control over what an already-interested shopper sees and where they land.

You may also want branded coverage when your organic search presence isn’t as clean as you’d like. Maybe retailers rank prominently for your products. Maybe review sites, marketplaces, old pages, or other results are competing for attention. Maybe you’re expanding into a market where your organic footprint is still developing.

Go deeper: Branded keywords vs. non-branded keywords, and what each tells you about growth (+ examples)

And sometimes branded paid search is simply inexpensive enough, and the incremental protection valuable enough, that keeping it running makes commercial sense.

The important part is that you know why you’re doing it.

“Brand always performs really well” is not a strategy.

Of course it performs well. They know your name.

This is where I’d pause before going forward with branded keyword bid strategies

I’d take a much harder look at branded spend when you already dominate the search results, competitive pressure is minimal, organic click-through is strong, and paid branded traffic appears to be largely cannibalizing clicks you would have received anyway.

This becomes even more important as budgets grow.

Will a few thousand dollars in unnecessary branded spend may not trigger alarm bells inside a large acquisition budget? Probably not. But over a year, across markets, product lines, and campaigns, those dollars add up. Every dollar you spend capturing demand you already own is a dollar you cannot use to create or acquire new demand somewhere else.

There’s also a reporting issue.

If branded search represents a large percentage of Google Ads conversions, your blended ROAS can start hiding weaknesses elsewhere in the account. Suddenly everyone is celebrating a 6X return while the actual prospecting engine is wheezing with a tragic 2X ROAS in the corner.

Go deeper: How to do a PPC audit the right way (process + examples)

Once more with feeling, this is why I strongly prefer looking at branded and non-branded search separately:

• You need to know how efficiently you’re capturing people who already know you.
• You also need to know how effectively Google Ads is helping you find people who don’t.

Those are different jobs, and blending them together makes it much harder to understand whether your acquisition strategy is actually growing.

Performance Max makes branded search even more important to understand

And because we’re apparently not allowed to have a simple Google Ads conversation anymore, we need to talk about Performance Max.

Performance Max can serve against branded queries unless you tell it not to.

That matters because branded conversions can make a Performance Max campaign look exceptionally efficient, even when some of that performance is coming from people who were already searching specifically for you.

Google now gives advertisers more control over this. (Hooray!)

Brand exclusions can prevent Performance Max from serving on earmarked branded searches across Search and Shopping inventory, and Google specifically recommends them when you want to manage branded traffic separately. Unlike ordinary negative keywords, brand exclusions can also account for common misspellings, variants, and related brand entities. 

Go deeper: How much are Google Ads for ecommerce? (budget + pricing guide)

Retail advertisers have another interesting option: Google allows you to exclude branded traffic from Performance Max Search text ads while continuing to allow Shopping ads for those branded searches.

That’s a lovely bonus for those of you in ecommerce. 

You may decide that showing your actual products when someone searches your brand is commercially valuable while still wanting branded text traffic separated from Performance Max so you can understand what the campaign is doing outside the comfortable embrace of people who already know your name.

There isn’t one universally correct setup.

There is, however, a very strong argument for knowing how much branded demand is flowing through Performance Max before you announce:

“PMAX IS ABSOLUTELY CRUSHING IT!!!!!!11”

So, should you bid on branded keywords?

Probably, in some capacity, for many high-growth ecommerce brands.

But “we should bid on our brand” and “we should buy every possible branded click forever” are two statements that sound similar but exist in entirely different universes. Or they should.

The right branded bidding strategy depends on competitive pressure, your organic presence, the shape of the SERP, your promotional calendar, your margins, how much branded demand exists, and most importantly, whether the ads are creating incremental business value.

Case study: How The Foot Doc achieved lead gen goals through strategic campaign optimization

Just keep the basics you learned here today in mind:

• Be smart, strategic, and deliberate with branded keyword bid strategies
• Separate their performance from non-branded campaigns designed to bring in new customers
• Go out of. yourway to understand how Performance Max is handling your branded traffic
• Do a deep dive into what your competitors are doing, don’t make assumptions in either direction
• Test (even just mentally) what would happen to your traffic and your revenue without branded performance

Because that gorgeous branded ROAS may represent valuable protection of revenue you would otherwise lose. Or you may be handing over a bunch of money to Google just to stand between a customer and the brand they were already trying to find.

You should probably know which one.

If you’re still stuck on whether or not your branded keyword bid strategy is the right one, let us know. The Solutions 8 team can help you review your Google Ads account, evaluate your branded vs. non-branded keyword strategy, and improve your campaign returns. Connect with us if you want a second set of eyes before you spend another dollar.