Won't competitors bid on my brand if I don't?

Often yes — which is why we run a defensive branded campaign where Auction Insights show real competitor bidding on your terms. The key is that the brand campaign runs in its own structure with maximum Quality Score, so the CPC stays low and Google's optimiser can't siphon your acquisition budget into brand clicks.

Should branded campaigns ever run?

Yes, in two cases: defensive bidding against competitors on your brand terms, and branded remarketing to warm audiences who visited but didn't buy. Both jobs are real. The fraud is mixing brand keywords into the same campaign as acquisition — which inflates your brand CPC and lets the optimiser starve your acquisition pool.

Don't branded campaigns catch customers at the bottom of the funnel?

They do, and that's their legitimate job — as a standalone campaign. What's illegitimate is letting brand keywords live inside an acquisition campaign so the account looks healthier than it is and your brand CPC runs at full acquisition-grade price.

What does a clean brand / non-brand campaign split actually look like?

Two campaigns, hard negative-keyword walls between them. Brand campaign targets your store name at minimum-CPC Quality Score. Non-brand campaign handles acquisition searches. Google's optimiser can't move money between them. Your reporting is unified, but the structure is clean.

How does kPixies handle branded search?

We split brand from non-brand at the campaign level, with negative-keyword walls preventing cross-contamination. Reporting is unified — our 5X floor and fee apply to total ad-attributable ROAS, verified in your own GA4. The structural separation drives low brand CPC and protects your acquisition budget.

Do you run branded remarketing campaigns?

Yes, when the audience size justifies it. Branded remarketing closes sales from shoppers who already engaged with your store. Those campaigns run inside the dedicated brand campaign structure — walled off from non-brand acquisition so the optimiser can't misallocate budget between them.

Branded Blending: The Campaign Structure That's Costing You Acquisition Budget

Type your own store name into Google. See that little “Sponsored” tag at the top? That’s an ad your agency is running. And that’s fine — a defensive branded campaign is part of a sane paid-search programme, and we run one too. What’s not fine is where most agencies put that branded keyword: inside the same campaign that’s supposed to be acquiring new customers.

That’s branded blending. It happens in the account structure, not in the monthly report. It’s invisible on a slide. And it’s the single most common reason your non-branded ad spend isn’t buying you the new customers you think you’re paying for.

Why branded campaigns do have a real job

Before we get to the structural problem, let’s be clear about what branded search is legitimately for. It earns its keep in two specific scenarios:

1. Defensive bidding. Competitors can and do bid on your brand terms. When a shopper types your name into Google and a competitor’s ad sits above your organic result, that’s a customer sitting one click away from being poached. A modest defensive branded campaign keeps you in the paid slot and protects the traffic you already earned.

2. Branded remarketing. Someone browsed your site last week, didn’t buy, and is now typing your name into Google to come back. Serving them a tailored remarketing ad — a specific product they viewed, a current offer, a shipping promo — closes sales that would otherwise leak.

Both of these belong in a mature Google Ads account. The question is not whether you should run a branded campaign. The question is whether your brand keywords are structurally walled off from your acquisition campaigns — or quietly blended in.

The problem isn’t the campaign. It’s the campaign structure.

Here’s the move. Your agency sets up what looks like a reasonable Google Ads account: one or two campaigns, targeting a mix of keywords that includes your store name alongside your generic product and category terms. Everything runs in one pool.

Three things happen at once — all of them bad for you, none of them visible without digging.

1. Google charges you more per click on your own store name. Brand searches sit in the highest possible Quality Score band when they run inside a dedicated brand campaign — Google recognises the trademark, sees near-perfect expected click-through, and rewards it with CPCs that can be a quarter of (or less than) what non-brand keywords cost. Mix them together inside a generic campaign and you lose that discount. You’re paying full acquisition-grade CPC on clicks that should have cost pennies.

2. The optimiser quietly siphons your acquisition budget onto brand clicks. Google’s Smart Bidding and Performance Max do exactly what you’d expect them to do: they funnel spend toward whatever converts best. Brand terms convert at 20X+ because the customer already knew your store. Non-brand acquisition converts at 1.5–3X on average. The algorithm is going to pour your budget into brand clicks — traffic you’d have captured for free through organic search — and leave your actual acquisition pool underfunded.

3. The account looks healthy on the monthly slide. Blended across brand and non-brand, the headline ROAS is respectable — brand is carrying it. “Google Ads ROAS: 6.8X” ends up on the front page of the report. The fact that your new-customer acquisition is running at 1.5X — or losing money — is buried two layers down, if it shows up at all.

If your current agency’s monthly report shows a single “Google Ads ROAS” figure and you’ve never been asked to help draw a line between brand and non-brand keywords in the account structure, this is almost certainly what’s happening.

What clean campaign structure looks like

Two campaigns. Hard wall between them.

Brand campaign. Targets your store name, common misspellings, and obvious brand variants. Small budget — enough to hold the top paid slot against competitor bids and catch warm remarketing traffic. CPCs are low because Google recognises it as a dedicated trademark campaign with maximum Quality Score. Return is high because these customers were already coming.

Non-brand campaign. Everything else that indicates real acquisition intent — category terms, product types, competitor terms, long-tail purchase queries. Most of your budget lives here, because this is where real growth comes from. ROAS is lower — a healthy non-brand figure for a physical retailer is typically between 3X and 8X — because you’re actually buying customers who didn’t know you existed.

The wall between them is enforced by the account structure itself — negative keywords on the non-brand side that block brand terms, negative keywords on the brand side that block anything non-brand. The optimiser can’t quietly move money from one pool to the other. Every dollar you’ve allocated to acquisition actually spends on acquisition.

How we report it

Our monthly report shows you one number at the top: total ad-attributable ROAS. Every sale from every paid Google click — brand and non-brand both counted — divided by total Google Ads spend. That’s the number the 5X floor applies to. That’s the number our fee is calculated on.

We do this deliberately. The business that matters to you is the whole ad programme, not a philosophical slice of it. If we held brand revenue out of the fee calculation, we’d be incentivised to minimise the brand campaign, which would cost you the defensive coverage and the cheap remarketing. If the brand campaign is earning revenue at 20X on a trickle of spend, you should want us to run it well. Counting that revenue in the fee keeps our interests pointed one direction: grow your total ad programme, end to end.

Internally, we still track non-brand acquisition ROAS separately. It’s the diagnostic number we use to judge whether the acquisition work is actually landing — and because the campaigns are structurally walled off, that number is finally meaningful. If you ever want to see it, we’ll show you. But the number we get paid on is the total.

The long game: converting non-branded searches into branded ones

There’s a second reason to architect the account this way that most agencies never explain, and it’s the reason good non-brand work compounds.

Effective non-brand acquisition doesn’t just buy you this month’s customer. It plants your store name in their head. Weeks later, when they want to buy again, they skip the generic search and type your store name directly into Google. That’s now a branded search — and because it lands in your dedicated brand campaign, it costs you a fraction of what the original acquisition click cost.

Over months, a well-run non-brand campaign keeps feeding the brand campaign. Your blended cost per acquisition trends down. Your total return trends up. The programme compounds. None of that is visible or measurable if the campaigns are smeared together — the acquisition-to-brand conversion loop disappears into the mixed pool.

How to spot it in your own account

You have access to your Google Ads account (you should — it’s yours). Two quick checks:

Look at your campaign list. Is there a single campaign named something like “Google Search,” “Brand + Search,” “All Products,” or “Main Campaign” catching everything? If one campaign is doing the work of two, you’ve found the structural problem.

Open the search terms report for your highest-spend campaign. If your store name appears in the top 20 search terms by cost, brand clicks are being funded out of what was supposed to be your acquisition budget.

If either of those shows up, your CPC is being inflated on your own trademark and your acquisition budget is paying — at least partially — for traffic you’d have captured for free. None of this requires a forensic audit to see. It’s on a single screen, inside the account you already own.

None of it means anything, of course, if the tracking underneath the account isn’t capturing real purchases in the first place (more on that on our bad tracking page). Structure is only half the fight. The other half is measuring the work honestly.

What changes when we take you on

The first week is structural. We split brand from non-brand into their own campaigns, with their own budgets and negative-keyword lists that prevent cross-contamination. We rebuild tracking so conversions land in the right campaign and nothing is double-counted. We establish the real baseline: the total ad-attributable ROAS, and the non-brand acquisition ROAS as an internal diagnostic. You see both.

In a lot of accounts, the structural separation alone — before any other optimisation — closes enough of the CPC leak and budget leak to show up in the first month. The real acquisition growth takes longer, but the worst of the inefficiency disappears immediately.

If you want an honest read on your account

The form below takes two minutes. It’s a call request, not a commitment. If we take you on, you get a structurally clean account, unified ad-attributable reporting at a 5X floor, and a diagnostic non-brand figure that’s finally telling you the truth about your acquisition work.

We only take on accounts where we can credibly clear 5X total ROAS on the ad programme as a whole. If we look at your numbers and that floor isn’t reachable, we’ll tell you — and we’ll usually tell you what would need to change for it to be.