Do Branded Search Campaigns Hurt Your Business?

I’ve managed my fair share of Google Ads accounts, and as a part of that I’ve also managed my fair share of branded search campaigns. These are fairly common, but also often debated in paid media circles.

When teams aren’t looking at the incremental impact of branded search campaigns, they love them. They’re naturally much more cost efficient because potential customers are already searching for your brand. As a result, they convert at a much higher rate, and you’re paying a lot less to capture that click.

The other side of the coin stems from the argument: why pay for these clicks when we likely already rank in the top spot organically?

It’s a fair question, and in some cases it doesn’t make sense to bid on branded terms because organic listing will pick up on that traffic.

However, I’d also like to take that argument a step further. Assuming there aren’t major competitors bidding on your brand, investing cash here can actually hurt your business by limiting growth.

A great use case for paid media, and paid search in particular, is getting your brand in front of net new prospects. When bidding on branded keywords, it’s possible you’re paying to drive site traffic for an audience that was going to your site anyway. This means that investment in a branded paid search campaign isn’t actually driving more revenue.

For example:

• With branded search

  • Monthly branded search cost - $1,000

  • Total monthly SQLs - 100

• Without branded search

  • Monthly branded search cost - $0

  • Total monthly SQLs - 100

In this hypothetical scenario, that $1,000 investment in branded search didn’t generate any more revenue. Instead, I recommend allocating this to other marketing efforts, potentially nonbrand paid search which can be much more incremental.

This can definitely be scary since paid search volume will almost certainly drop. My recommendation is to keep an eye on total lead volume across all channels while this test is running, and also focus on changes in lead volume coming from organic search. There’s a chance that while paid search volume decreases slightly, overall lead volume will increase as organic search traffic picks up the slack from paid, and an additional investment in nonbrand drives more incremental leads.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.