Every account I take over has a branded campaign. Almost none of them are set up right. Either it's bleeding budget on manual CPC bids that are way too high, or it doesn't exist as a separate campaign at all and Performance Max is quietly eating clicks that should cost pennies. Branded search is the one part of your account where you're not really competing for attention — the person already typed your company name. The job is to capture that demand as cheaply as possible, not to treat it like a competitive keyword.
Why you still need a dedicated branded campaign
Some business owners ask me why they should pay for clicks on their own name when they'd rank organically anyway. Two reasons. First, competitors bid on your brand term — I see this constantly, especially in ecommerce and SaaS where a rival will happily show up above your organic listing. Losing that top slot means losing customers who were already sold, just to someone else's ad. Second, the SERP real estate matters: sitelinks, callouts, and a clean branded ad reinforce trust and push down anything else trying to occupy that space, including comparison sites and affiliates that skim your margin.
Branded search is the only place in Google Ads where you're not buying attention — you're just paying to not lose it.
The overspend problem
Here's where it goes wrong. I've audited accounts spending 15-20% of total budget on branded terms, at a CPC that would make sense for a competitive category term, not a search with near-100% intent to buy or already-decided loyalty. Branded traffic should convert at a much higher rate for a much lower cost than anything else you run. If your branded CPC is anywhere close to your non-branded CPC, something is misconfigured — usually manual CPC bids left untouched for a year, or Smart Bidding applied without a cap, chasing volume it doesn't need to chase.
Which bidding strategy to actually use
For branded, I default to one of two options, and the decision comes down to what you're protecting against.
- Manual CPC (or Enhanced CPC) when there's low or no competitor conquesting on your brand term — you control the cost directly and there's no reason to hand it to an algorithm optimizing for a conversion value it doesn't need help finding.
- Target Impression Share when competitors are actively bidding on your name and you need to guarantee you hold the top spot — set the target to "absolute top of page" only if conquesting is aggressive, otherwise "top of page" is usually enough and meaningfully cheaper.
- Avoid Target ROAS or Target CPA on branded campaigns in most cases — these strategies push spend up when they see strong conversion rates, and branded search converts so well that the algorithm will happily raise your bids well past what's necessary.
The practical test: pull up the auction insights report on your branded campaign. If competitor overlap is minimal, manual CPC with a tight bid cap wins every time. If you see the same two or three competitors showing up regularly, Target Impression Share is worth the extra cost — but I still set a max CPC bid limit so the algorithm can't run away with it.
The bigger leak: PMax and Shopping eating your branded traffic
This is the part most people miss entirely, and it's the one I've written about in depth in Why Your Performance Max Campaign Is Cannibalizing Your Branded Search. Performance Max doesn't respect campaign priority the way Search does, and it will happily serve on branded queries inside your general Shopping or PMax campaign — at a cost and reporting structure that make it look like PMax is your top performer, when really it's just harvesting demand your branded campaign should have captured for less.
One PMax campaign handles all products. Branded queries flow into it alongside non-branded, inflating its apparent ROAS while masking the true cost of acquiring new customers.
Branded terms are excluded from PMax/Shopping via negative keywords or brand exclusions where available, and a separate branded Shopping campaign runs alongside branded Search — both cheap, both measurable on their own.
The fix has two parts. First, exclude branded terms from your non-branded Search, Shopping, and PMax campaigns — use negative keyword lists at the account level so you're not maintaining them campaign by campaign. Second, build a separate branded Shopping campaign, same logic as branded Search: lower budget, tighter bid strategy, and it exists specifically to serve people who already searched your product or brand by name. This also cleans up your reporting — you can finally see what your non-branded spend is actually returning, without branded conversions propping up the average.
- ✓︎Confirm you have a standalone branded Search campaign, not folded into a general one
- ✓︎Choose manual CPC for low-conquesting brands, Target Impression Share only when competitors bid on your name
- ✓︎Set a max CPC cap even when using Target Impression Share
- ✓︎Add branded terms as account-level negatives across non-branded Search, Shopping, and PMax
- ✓︎Build a separate branded Shopping campaign instead of letting PMax absorb branded product searches
- ✓︎Check auction insights monthly for new competitor conquesting on your name
None of this is complicated once it's set up. The reason most accounts get it wrong is that nobody goes back and checks — branded campaigns get set up once, left on autopilot, and forgotten while attention goes to the campaigns that feel like they need optimizing. Ironically, that's exactly why they end up wasting the most money for the least effort to fix.