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I would always keep brand and non-brand campaign separate. There are a few strong reasons to do so:
1. The massive ROAS difference between brand and non-brand keywords makes ROAS target setting difficult for a campaign tha has a mix of both. If you set it too high, you’ll only get brand traffic. If you set it too low, you may pay a lot higher CPC for the brand traffic than you should. The massive gap may also make the bidding algorithms think that the non-brand keywords are not performing well, lowering your visibility for them.
2. Brand searches are very different by its nature than non-brand searches. Brand search traffic is typically a lot less incremental because those people were already very aware of you to the point of choosing to search for you. At the same time brand searches are cheap to advertise for and you’ll probably want to be visible for all of them in order to maximize your visibility and minimize competitor visibility for your own brand searches so that you’ll not have a leaking bucket at that critical point – while brand searches are less incremental, they still usually have some incrementality as people can still be swayed by competitors who fit their needs when they’re searching for you. Separating the campaigns makes it easier to budget and analyze the results separately.
3. Separating brand searches to a different campaign from non-brand makes it possible to control your brand search costs better.cI usually aim for at least 90% absolute top of page impression share for brand search campaigns and try to minimize the CPC by setting a max CPC limit at a level that keeps the total CPC as low as possible but still allows for 90% absolute top of page impression share.
