Search your own business name right now and look at what sits above your website.
In competitive categories it is often a competitor. They bid on your name, they wrote an ad about why they are the better choice, and they are collecting people who were specifically looking for you. It costs them very little, because they only pay when someone clicks.
Most owners find this infuriating. It is also completely allowed. Google permits bidding on competitor brand terms, with one meaningful restriction we will come to.
The question this chapter answers is what it costs you to leave that unanswered, and whether a brand campaign is worth running when those people were searching for you anyway.
The Cheapest Clicks in Your Account
Brand terms behave differently to everything else you buy, and the difference is large.
When somebody searches your business name, your ad is overwhelmingly the most relevant result. Your landing page is your own site. Your click-through rate on your own name is far higher than on generic terms. All three of those feed quality score, and quality score is what decides how much you pay per click.
The result is that brand clicks routinely cost a fraction of what non-brand clicks cost in the same account. On one supplements account we audited, brand terms were converting at a small fraction of the account's blended cost per acquisition, simply because nobody else could compete with the advertiser on their own name.
That price gap is why brand terms deserve their own campaign rather than sitting alongside everything else. Mixed in, they drag the whole campaign's averages down and make every other number harder to read.
"They Were Going to Find Us Anyway"
This is the honest objection, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a brush-off.
If someone searches your exact business name, your organic listing is almost certainly first. Paying for a click you would have received free is, on the face of it, buying something you already own.
Sometimes that is exactly what it is. If nobody bids against you, your organic result is strong, and you are not driving demand from other channels, a brand campaign can genuinely be an expense rather than an investment. We have told clients to turn one off.
But three things usually change the answer.
It is defensive. If a competitor is bidding on your name, your organic listing is now below a paid ad selling against you. Running your own brand campaign puts you back at the top and makes their click expensive rather than cheap, because your relevance on your own name beats theirs.
It is the cheapest quality conversion data you will ever get. Brand searchers convert at high rates. Those conversions feed Smart Bidding, and an account starved of conversion data is an account that cannot use automated bidding at all. Getting real conversions in cheaply is exactly what a young account needs, which connects directly to the 30-conversion threshold.
It lets you control the message. Your organic listing shows whatever Google decides to show. Your ad says what you want it to say, with the offer you want, pointing at the page you choose.
Brand Terms Hiding In Your Other Campaigns
Here is the version of this problem we find most often, and it is not the dramatic one.
It is not that the business has no brand campaign. It is that brand searches are being caught by their non-brand campaigns, quietly, because the keywords are loose enough to match them.
We audited a coffee equipment supplier whose company name was showing up in the search terms report of a general campaign. Nobody put it there. Broad and phrase match keywords had simply absorbed it.
That does two kinds of damage. The obvious one is that your cheap, high-converting brand traffic is inflating the results of a campaign that did not earn it, which makes a mediocre campaign look fine. The subtler one is that you are now bidding on your own name at generic-campaign bid levels, which is more than you need to pay.
The fix is mechanical. Put your brand terms in their own campaign, then add them as negative keywords in every other campaign so the traffic goes where you intend. Include the obvious variants: your name misspelled, your name plus a service, your name plus your city, and the names of individual people if the business trades on them.
The Attribution Trap
There is a caveat here that stops brand campaigns being a free win, and it is worth understanding before you judge the numbers.
A brand campaign will often look like your best performer. Lowest cost per conversion, highest conversion rate, by a wide margin. It is tempting to conclude it deserves more budget.
But watch what actually happens. Someone searches a generic term, sees your non-brand ad, clicks through, reads your site, does not convert. Two days later they remember your name and search for it directly, click the brand ad, and book.
The brand campaign gets the conversion. The non-brand campaign did the work.
We manage an account where more conversions began arriving through the brand campaign, and the honest reading was not that the brand campaign improved. It was that the rest of the account was creating enough awareness for people to come back and search by name.
Practically: do not shift budget away from your non-brand campaigns because brand looks more efficient. It is more efficient. It is also downstream of everything else you are doing.
When You Are Driving Demand Somewhere Else
The case for a brand campaign gets much stronger when something outside Google is making people search for you.
We audited a prefab building company running television advertising. Their brand terms were climbing, because that is what television does. Anyone spending on TV, radio, podcasts, billboards or heavy organic social is manufacturing brand searches, and every one of those searches is a moment where a competitor can sit above them.
If you are spending money to make people aware of you, spending a little more to make sure you are what they find is not double-paying. It is protecting the first spend.
There is a timing detail worth knowing. Brand search volume spikes while the other channel is running and decays afterward, which means a brand campaign set up once and left alone will look wildly efficient during a campaign burst and mediocre in the quiet weeks. That is not the campaign changing. It is the demand behind it changing.
The practical version: if you are about to run television, radio, an event, a podcast push or a large organic campaign, switch the brand campaign on before it starts rather than after somebody notices the traffic.
What Google Does and Does Not Allow
Two rules worth knowing, because people get them backwards.
Competitors may bid on your brand name as a keyword. That is allowed and there is no complaint that changes it.
They generally may not use your trademarked name in their ad text. Google restricts trademarked terms in ad copy, and a trademark owner can file a complaint. This is why competitor ads on your name tend to be vague: they cannot say your name, so they say "the better alternative" and hope you know what they mean.
That restriction is also your advantage. You can use your own name in your headline. They cannot. Your ad will be more relevant, cheaper per click, and more obviously the right answer, which is why defending your own brand terms is one of the few auctions where you hold most of the cards.
One caveat on resellers and partners. If other businesses legitimately sell your product, they may have a genuine right to use the name, and a trademark complaint against an authorized reseller is a fight you probably do not want. The people worth challenging are competitors using your name in copy while selling against you.
And if you find a competitor sitting on your name, the fastest response is not a complaint. It is running your own brand campaign, because their click gets more expensive the moment your relevance beats theirs.
Setting It Up
- One campaign, brand terms only. Separate budget, separate reporting.
- Exact and phrase match on your name and its close variants. Include misspellings, your name plus service, your name plus location, and key individuals' names.
- Negative your brand terms out of every other campaign so the traffic routes where you intend.
- Keep the budget small. Brand volume is what it is. This campaign should rarely be budget-limited, and if it is, something else is wrong.
- Judge it separately. Never blend it into account-wide cost per acquisition. It will flatter every number it touches.
- Check the auction insights report on the brand campaign specifically. That is where you see exactly who is bidding on your name.
None of this is expensive. A brand campaign in a small Google Ads account often runs on a few dollars a day, because you are winning an auction almost nobody else can compete in.
Bidding on their names is a different question with different economics, and it is the next chapter.
We check auction insights on brand terms in every audit, and it is a routinely uncomfortable slide. If you would rather we handled it, we can. If you would rather do it yourself, start by searching your own name on a phone that is not logged into your account, and see who is sitting above you.
