Should you bid on your
own brand terms?
Bidding on your own brand terms is only worth it when it drives incremental sales, which a holdout test can prove, not because brand campaigns report a flattering return on ad spend from people who were coming anyway. The strongest case is defensive: if competitors, resellers or affiliates bid on your name, a brand ad stops them intercepting high-intent buyers. If incrementality is low, cut brand CPCs in 10-20% steps and raise them again if impression share drops below 80%.
Why do Google Ads brand campaigns report such a high return on ad spend?
When you bid on your own brand, you are buying clicks from people who already typed your name into Google. They know who you are. Many of them were coming anyway. So the campaign reports a huge ROAS, your blended ROAS ticks up, and the account looks healthier than it is.
This is exactly why agencies love brand campaigns. A brand line item is the cheapest way to make a report look good - high ROAS, low CPC, strong conversion rate. It pads the headline number and quietly masks weak prospecting performance underneath. If your account is being judged on blended ROAS, brand bidding is the easiest way to game it without growing the business one bit.
The case for bidding on brand
Bidding on your own brand terms makes sense mainly for defence and control: when competitors, affiliates or resellers bid on your name, or when you need to control the message during a sale or launch.
There are legitimate reasons to do it. When I audit an account for the first time, the finding is usually around defence and control rather than acquisition.
- Competitors are on your SERP. If a rival is bidding on your name, not showing up means their ad sits above your organic listing and intercepts your buyer at the moment of highest intent. This is the single strongest argument, and it is purely defensive.
- Affiliates and resellers are bidding on you. Same logic. If a reseller is buying your brand term to sell your own product at a margin to you, a brand ad can claw that traffic back to a direct sale. They also then own the 1P data that can then be used in retention plays.
- You control the message. A paid ad lets you dictate the headline, run sitelinks, push a current promotion, and steer people to a specific landing page rather than wherever organic decides to send them. During a sale or launch, that control has real value.
None of these are "it has a high ROAS." The ROAS is a consequence of buying intent you already created. It is not evidence the spend is working.
The case against
Bidding on your own brand terms is often wasteful because it mostly harvests clicks you already had, inflates blended ROAS and hides weak prospecting performance.
- It is usually harvesting, not acquiring. If you own the SERP uncontested, you are paying for clicks you already had. That is the default state for lots brands, and it is the most common reason brand spend is quietly wasteful.
- It inflates your blended ROAS and hides weak prospecting. This is the real damage. A juiced blended number makes a struggling acquisition engine look fine, so the actual problem - non-brand performance that is not pulling its weight - never gets diagnosed. You optimise toward a metric that is lying to you.
- It pollutes your new customer maths. Brand searchers are overwhelmingly people who already know you. Counting them as acquisition flatters your NCAC and your new customer volume, the exact numbers that should be steering the account. If new customer growth is the north star, brand bidding is mostly recording existing demand as if it were new.
- The budget has a better home. Every pound on brand harvesting is a pound not spent on prospecting that could be bringing in genuinely new customers. For a profit-first account, that opportunity cost is the whole argument.
How do you test whether brand bidding drives incremental sales?
To test whether brand bidding drives incremental sales, check who else is bidding on your brand in the search results, then run a time-based or geo holdout and compare total revenue with and without the brand campaign.
Read the SERP before you spend a penny
Search your own brand terms in incognito (removes personalised results) and look at the page honestly.
If you rank #1 organically and there are no competitors or wholesalers/stockists bidding on your name, and there is no Shopping carousel or other unit pushing your organic listing below the fold, then a paid ad is largely buying a click you were going to get for free. That is harvesting, not acquisition.
If competitors, resellers, or affiliates are bidding on your brand, the calculation changes completely. Now there is something sitting above your organic listing trying to intercept your customer. The incremental value of showing up is no longer about the click - it is about not handing a warm, high-intent buyer to someone else.
Run a brand holdout test
Incrementality is the conversions and revenue you would not have gotten if the brand campaign did not exist. The goal is to separate genuinely new demand you are capturing from traffic you are simply harvesting on its way to you.
A holdout is simple in principle: you stop bidding on brand for a defined window, then measure what happens to your total topline sales against a baseline period or a control.
You can run it two ways:
- Time-based holdout. Pause brand for a period of multiple weeks (long enough to clear your payback window and account for weekly seasonality), then compare total revenue against an equivalent prior period. Crude, but workable for smaller accounts.
- Geo holdout. Split your regions. Keep brand running in one set, pause it in another with similar baseline demand, and compare. This controls for seasonality and market-wide swings far better than a before-and-after, and it is the closest thing to a clean read most D2C brands can run.
When you switch the paid campaign off, how much revenue did you lose? If organic catches almost all of it, your incrementality is near zero and you are paying to acquire a customer you would've got anyway. A paid search expert running one of these can save you serious £ in the long run.
Refining
Once you have a holdout result, throw away the campaign-reported ROAS.
You should now have a clear understanding of how incremental the campaign is. If highly incremental - keep live.
If incrementality is low, considering dropping CPCs by 10-20% increments and monitor impact on top-line week over week.
This allows you to reduce COS whilst protecting branded real estate on SERPs.
If you start to see imp,share on brand drop below 80% then consider upping the CPC to maintain dominance.
This approach enables you to tweak up and down as needed whilst using your actual business sales as the north-star - enabling you to optimise towards Cost of sale reduction.
The verdict: don't default to it, prove it
Bidding on your own brand terms should not be a default line item - keep it only if a holdout test proves it drives incremental sales.
The honest answer is that it depends, and the dependency is measurable, so measure it. For more on diagnosing and optimising a Google Ads campaign beyond brand bidding, see the Google Ads Campaign Optimisation & Troubleshooting Hub.
Further reading
Is your prospecting budget spent on retargeting?
Why separating brand, prospecting and retargeting campaigns is not enough - and how to ensure your prospecting budget is actually reaching new customers.
My step-by-step process to uncover the real account problems
The foundational checks to run when dropping into any Google Ads account unseen - uncovering real problems and growth opportunities in under 20 minutes.
How to write irresistible Google Ads copy
The RSA structure broken down headline by headline - intent, function, risk reversal, promo and emotional benefits - plus a free template to build and bulk upload from.