Brand search behaves completely differently from every other paid channel and is routinely reported alongside it, which distorts the whole account. These searchers have already decided to find you; the ad intercepts a click you would frequently have won organically at no cost.
The consequence is that brand campaigns show spectacular ROAS (often 8–15x) and very low incrementality. They aren't creating demand. They're harvesting demand created elsewhere, and crediting them with the resulting revenue misattributes the work of every channel that built the awareness.
None of that means bidding on your brand is wrong. There are defensible reasons: competitors bidding on your name, controlling the message above an outdated organic result, or occupying more of a SERP where reviews and comparison sites sit high. It means the spend should be justified on those grounds, not on its reported return.
Why Brand Search matters
Brand search is the single largest source of inflated blended ROAS. An account reporting a healthy overall return where 40% of conversions come from brand is usually much less efficient than it looks, and the non-brand campaigns doing the actual acquisition work may appear unprofitable when they aren't.
Splitting the report
Separate brand and non-brand into distinct campaigns and report them separately, always. It's common to find a blended 4.5x resolving into 11x on brand and 1.8x on non-brand. That changes both the budget conversation and the assessment of whether acquisition is actually working.
Benchmarks
- Typical brand campaign ROAS
- 8–15x reported
- Typical brand incrementality
- far lower than reported
Ranges drawn from Digital Squad client accounts and published industry data. Treat them as orientation, not targets. Your category may differ substantially.
Common mistakes
Reporting brand and non-brand together
The blended figure flatters the account and hides whether genuine acquisition is profitable. This is the most common reporting error we find in paid search.
Never testing its incrementality
Pausing brand campaigns in a subset of geographies for four weeks answers this directly. Most advertisers avoid the test because they suspect the answer.
Assuming competitor bidding requires a response
Sometimes it does. Often the competitor is paying a premium for clicks that convert poorly, and matching them just raises both parties' costs.
Bidding brand while the organic result is strong
If you already own the first organic result and no competitor is bidding, the incremental value of the ad is frequently close to zero.
Where we work on this