Branded Search Best Practices

[fathom53]

Pretty normal to add your brand name as a negative keyword to your non-brand campaigns. That is a better strategy then leaving as is and having it all mixed together.

[Hai_Byte_Marketing]

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.

[VillageHomeF]

there is part when setting up the campaign that asks to exclude branded. that is the proper way to do it.

depends on the brand. we would never pay for a branded click as we come up as the only links on first page between the home page, linkedin, Instagram, etc. and would get the click anyway

this is up to you. every business is different.

[Alex-Hales-2010]

TL;DR: You should have separate campaign(s) for brand keywords than non-branded ones. This should generally be the case with only a few exceptions.

Detail:
Using the Manual Bidding strategy is usually the best strategy for brand campaigns. The reason is, you can get high Quality Scores (QS) for brand keywords at a very low CPC because all the other factors contributing to QS are in your favor as compared to anyone bidding on your brand keywords.

Unless your non-branded campaigns are using Manual Bidding strategy, by using brand keywords in such campaigns, you are giving Google’s algorithm the option to inflate CPCs for something you could achieve at a comparatively much lower CPC.

[ppcwithyrv]

whats your impression share—should be around 85% for brand.

[ernosem]

This is a very common question, so I created a video instead where I tried to cover all the pros and cons:
[https://youtu.be/xfLCA_DNTkw](https://youtu.be/xfLCA_DNTkw)

[w2best]

Definitely divide the two. It’s impossible to know the actual performance of the account otherwise and you will not be any to make incremental sales. You just attribute more of the already existing demand. 

Use negative lists as much as you can and clean up that stuff.

“Is there a case for having campaigns that have mixed brand and non-brands?”

It is in Pmax/shopping because it’s very hard to make it brand only but you can still have a brand including and excluding campaign