Branded keywords vs non branded keywords: what they tell you about growth (+ examples)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. 

Wait! Actually, don’t stop me. We need to talk about something important. 

Anyway, you’re in a meeting. Search performance looks good. Someone’s pointing to conversion rates. Someone else is feeling great about ROAS. The numbers are clean enough that everyone starts relaxing a little. 

Except for you, right?

You, like me, are a suspicious person. Now, this could be because you read one too many Agatha Christie mysteries when you were an impressionable young kiddo when everyone else was out playing kickball at recess (also like me), so you take nothing at face value. Everyone is a suspect! 

But my guess is you’re a smart person who looks at those numbers and realizes a big chunk of that “great campaign performance” is coming from people who were already searching for your brand.

That doesn’t mean the performance is fake, however. But you’re likely dealing with an incomplete story. And that’s usually where the conversation around branded keywords vs non-branded keywords starts getting more interesting than most marketing teams would like.

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On paper, both types of keywords can drive traffic, conversions, and revenue. In practice, they’re doing very different jobs. One tends to capture existing demand. The other tends to help create new paths into the brand. One usually looks cleaner and more efficient. The other often does the heavier lifting of discovery and growth.

Once you start lumping them together, you’ve got a problem. 

Can you rely on the story your reports are telling you?

Is your strategy as strong as you think it is?

Are you confident in what your paid campaigns are actually doing for your business?

If you’re leading marketing at a high-growth ecommerce brand, you need to know what each keyword type is doing, what each one is good for, and where the numbers can give you a false sense of security in your campaign performance. By the end of this article, you should be able to separate branded and non-branded search more clearly, understand what each one is telling you, and make better decisions about acquisition, reporting, and channel strategy.

First, what are branded and non-branded keywords?

OK, let’s establish our shared, basic definitions:

Branded keywords are search terms that include your brand name, product name, or some other term clearly tied to your company. If someone searches for your brand directly, a specific product line, or a branded variation of what you sell, that falls into the branded bucket.

Non-branded keywords are the broader category, product, problem, or solution terms that do not include your brand. These are the searches people use when they are looking for something you sell or a problem you solve, but they are not looking for you by name.

Fairly easy-peasy lemon squeezy, right? Sure, but the strategic implications are where things get more interesting.

Branded keywords usually mean demand already exists

Branded search tends to reflect existing brand awareness.

Or, in more human terms, your buyers already know who you are and how you might be able to help them. 

Maybe they saw a paid ad, heard about you from a friend, clicked an influencer link three days ago, saw your product on TikTok, or got one of your emails and came back later through search because that felt easier than digging through their inbox like a raccoon gorging itself on leftovers in the dumpster.

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It doesn’t matter how they got there, honestly. The headline here is they’re no longer looking for a generic solution. They are looking for you.

That usually makes branded traffic more efficient:

• Conversion rates tend to be stronger
• Click-through rates tend to be healthier
• The person is often further along in the decision process, or at least more familiar with the brand
• Search feels less like discovery and more like navigation with intent attached.

This is why branded keyword performance can look so reassuring in reports; these are warmer users. Theoretically, it should take less effort to close the distance between visitor and buyer or lead.

And you nodded along to all of that, I don’t blame you. You’re also not wrong. But if you’re laser-focused on branded keyword performance, you might accidentally assume how well paid campaigns are “driving growth,” when a large share of those wins are coming from people who were already on your side.

Non-branded keywords are where discovery usually happens

Non-branded keywords are usually how people find you before they know who you are.

But we marketers aren’t totally in love with this bucket of keywords, because they’re broad and messy. Much like the trunk of my Jeep I was going to clean out three months ago. (I’m getting to it, OK? Mind your business.) 

Anyway, when someone types in a non-branded keyword they’re not focused on you. They’re looking for a product category, a use case, a problem to solve, a comparison, or a type of item. They might be early in the journey. They might be comparing options. They might be close to purchase but still evaluating the field.

Either way, you have to earn their attention more directly because they did not come in looking for your brand.

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That’s why non-branded search often feels harder, because you’re dealing with a colder audience where there’s more competition. On top of that, the customer journey is much less linear and consistent than we’d like to admit. 

For example:

• When I bought my last car, I did research for about three days online after deciding it was time. I walked on the lot, already knowing exactly what I wanted. And when I saw her out front of the dealership, I pointed my finger at her and declared “That’s my baby!” Because I’m embarrassing.
  
  
• As of today, I’m on month six of my buying journey for a new desk chair. Significantly cheaper than a car. I have seven different chairs in the online shopping carts from different vendors. It will likely be another four months before I whittle that list of seven down to… 12. I have problems, I know. 

This is why your conversion rates may not look as pretty as compared to those associated with your branded keywords. Performance can be slower to develop and more expensive to win, especially if you are looking at paid search or trying to build organic visibility in competitive categories.

This is where some of the most important growth work happens

If branded keywords help you capture demand that already exists, non-branded keywords often help you reach the people who have not made up their minds yet, or who have never heard of you in the first place. That makes them critical for new customer acquisition and category-level visibility. They’re often where the brand has to prove it deserves a place in the consideration set at all.

Is this glamorous work? Of course not. This is not the time or place to get Fergalicious. Still, it’s work you’ve gotta do. 

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High-growth ecommerce brands need branded and non-branded keywords because the two buckets support different parts of the growth story:

• Branded keywords help you capture existing demand efficiently. They matter because people who already know your brand should be able to find you easily, move toward purchase with minimal friction, and encounter a search experience that reinforces rather than undermines that intent. If you have brand awareness, you want to protect it and convert it well.
  
  
• Non-branded keywords help you grow beyond the people already in your orbit. They matter because customer acquisition eventually gets expensive and awkward when you are relying too heavily on the same warm audiences, the same remarketing pools, and the same loyalists who already know exactly where to find you.

You need both because one helps you harvest existing demand and the other helps you widen the top of the funnel with people who are not there yet. Once you understand that, the real job becomes less about debating which one is “better” and more about understanding what each bucket is supposed to do for the business.

What branded keywords are actually good for

Branded keywords usually earn their keep in a few very specific ways:

• They’re fantastic at capturing high-intent traffic from people already familiar with the brand. 
  
  
• They’re ridiculously useful for defending branded demand, especially if competitors are bidding on your name or trying to intercept category-aware shoppers who are already leaning in your direction. 
  
  
• They can also be a strong source of efficient conversions, which is kind of a big deal when you’re trying to protect overall search economics.

As a bonus, branded keywords are often one of the clearest signals that your other marketing is doing something useful: paid social, influencer activity, PR, content, email, partnerships, word of mouth, organic social, direct mail, YouTube, retail presence… all of it can feed branded search demand over time. 

When more people search for your brand by name, that often tells you awareness and interest are building somewhere in the system.

What non-branded keywords are actually good for

Non-branded keywords are usually where search does the tougher, earlier work of acquisition. Remember, these are the keywords that (while unbranded) help you reach where shoppers are still deciding what they want to buy, not merely where they want to buy it.

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That means your non-branded keywords are your work horses for increasing category visibility, driving new customer acquisition, and building presence outside your existing brand demand:

• In paid search, they can help you reach a broader audience with commercial intent even if the pathway to them buying from you is messier.
  
  
• In organic search, they can help you build durable discovery around the questions and product searches your future customers are already making.

This is also why non-branded performance needs more thoughtful evaluation. These queries often sit earlier in the journey, which means the last-click numbers may not flatter them as much as branded search does. They may introduce the brand, support consideration, or start a path to conversion that closes later through another touchpoint.

You still need accountability. You also need a little perspective.

Why the two buckets shouldn’t be judged by the same standard

A lot of campaign reporting gets distorted because teams expect branded and non-branded keywords to behave the same way.

But, duh. Of course, they don’t. 

Branded search tends to be more efficient because it captures demand that is already more formed. Non-branded search tends to be less efficient in the short term because it is doing more of the work of introducing the brand or competing at the category level.

If you measure both only through the same narrow lens, branded will often look like the hero and non-branded will often look like the problem child who always has house parties when you’re out of town and then blames it on their little brother. 

(Is that how it works? I’m an only child, so I had to do the time for all of my crimes.)

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A better approach is to judge each bucket based on the job it is actually doing:

• For branded keywords, you should care about capture rate, efficiency, visibility, and whether branded demand is being protected and converted well.
  
  
• For non-branded keywords, you should care about reach into relevant new audiences, quality of traffic, new customer contribution, category visibility, assisted performance, and the strength of the landing pages or content connected to those searches.

You still want performance from both. You just want the right expectations attached.

Where ecommerce brands usually get branded vs. non-branded keywords wrong

We’ve already talked about over-indexing on measuring performance based on branded traffic. That’s really the big problem. But it can also sometimes (see: “often”) lead to other problems:

• Underinvesting in non-branded search because it appears slower, less efficient, and more annoying to explain in neat monthly summaries. Look, I get it. But you can’t only invest in campaigns where someone already knows you. 
  
  
• Getting lazy about branded keywords because you assume those searches will always perform well on their own. But those branded keywords still need to lead to strategically designed landing pages optimized for conversions, where you can tell a lot of thought went into the customer experience.

Oh, and then there’s my personal favorite! 

You can also give marketers like me a bit too much of a pat on the back for branded keyword performance. Why? Because it seems like a good bellwether for how marketing is doing overall. If brand recognition is up, we must be doing something right, right? Right? Please validate our lowly marketer existence.

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Rising branded search can absolutely signal stronger awareness and demand. It can also mask the fact that non-branded discovery is underpowered and the growth engine is leaning heavily on people who already know the brand name.

What you should be able to answer as a marketing leader

By the time you have a decent handle on branded and non-branded keywords, you should be able to answer a few questions with some confidence:

• How much of your campaign performance is coming from people who already know the brand?
  
  
• How much is coming from people discovering the brand through category or problem-based searches?
  
  
• Are branded keywords doing what they should do in terms of efficient demand capture?
  
  
• Are non-branded keywords reaching the right new audiences and supporting growth, even if the conversion pattern is messier?
  
  
• Are the two buckets being reported separately enough that leadership can understand what search is actually contributing?
  
  
• Is your current investment mix aligned with the kind of growth you need, or are you leaning too hard on the easy wins?

If you don’t know the answers to those questions right now, don’t panic. This is your roadmap to clarity and better performance.

You’ve got to look beyond the definitions for something useful

The conversation around branded keywords vs non-branded keywords gets boring very quickly when it stays at the level of definitions. But once you start asking what each one is actually telling you about growth, well, now you’re onto something.

Yes, branded keywords usually tell you how well you are capturing existing demand. And yes, non-branded keywords usually tell you how well you are reaching people who have not chosen you yet. Both matter, drive, value, and deserve a a prominent place in the strategy. 

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But if you remember nothing else from this article, let it be this:

Those two camps of keywords tell two entirely different stories, so now is the time to stop measuring them like they do.

So, if you’re a high-growth ecommerce brand, and you want a more honest view of performance, a smarter acquisition strategy, and less self-congratulation built on half-true reporting, you need to separate the two and understand the role each one plays.