As a business owner you'll want to protect your own brand name in the SERP (search engine result page) from competitors who are targeting your brand name, and piggybacking out of your (hard earned) brand awareness. There's only been a few cases were i have turned off branded search campaigns due to the brands SEO work being being perfectly executed, but that not what i want to talk about today.

Today we're going to talk about how to set your branded search campaign up for succes so that you: 

1. Reach +90% impression share on your own brand terms
2. Keep the same sales volume on your brand terms
3. While spending the absolute minimum on your brand terms

As a Google Ads expert, i feel like it's my responsibility to educate you on how to successfully build your branding campaign and make sure you don't pay premium for brand clicks.

9/10 Google Ads account that i enter make the same mistake on their branding campaign, and i can in all instances scale down their branding campaigns with the same sales volume which means ROAS goes up, and CPA goes down. Happy days.

By implementing the right optimizations, you can achieve a cost reduction of 30-80% on your ad spend.

Here are three adjustments to consider:

There are 3 elements in your brand campaign that you would want to be proactive about.

1. Use Target Impression Share Bidding:

Switch to Target Impression Share bidding, which aims to maximize your brand terms visibility. This bidding method does not consider conversion rate or order value metrics, making it an ideal choice for branded search campaigns, as we can assume that your very own brand terms will have the highest CVR in the entire account.

In the bidding model settings i like to set the target impression share to ~95%

2. Set Maximum CPC Bid Limits

To avoid paying to much for irrelevant search terms from your brand terms (yes it happens) in auctions, set maximum CPC bid limits for your campaign. This approach ensures that your CPC won't be charged more than the set amount in avg. The CPC cap can be set quite low down to the 0.XX in cost, but keep an eye on impression share – If target impression share isen't being meet > raise your CPC cap in small increments until you hit yout target impression share

3. Use Exact Match Keywords

This is super duper important – in 9/10 cases you would want to use exact match keywords for you own brand terms, and there is a couple of reasons for that: 

1. To have 100% control over the search term > ad message
2. To protect your brands terms from your Performance Max campaign (pMax campaigns will not cannibalize your exact match keywords in most cases) 
3. Because you don't want to be matched up with competitor terms.

If all this is done right, you'll see something similar to this

In the image above it's clear to see when i switched this branding campaign from phrase match keywords + tCPA > exact match keywords + target impression share w/ CPC cap.

If you got to this point, i have a task for you to try out this week. Running a simple experiment comparing your current branding campaign setup, to the suggested optimizations and let it run for 4 weeks and gauge their impact on your ad spend. This approach can help adjust your strategy accordingly and ensure that your branded search campaigns achieve the desired results while reducing costs.

By implementing these optimizations, you can optimize your branded search campaigns, reduce your costs on protecting you own brand term, and maximize your ROI.

As a result, you'll achieve better results and have more spend to allocate to your non-branded efforts in your Google Ads account, which is the best win/win you can achieve