Most Google Ads accounts are over-bidding on brand campaigns

Most Google Ads accounts are over-bidding on brand campaigns.

We see it constantly. A business spending £4,000 a month on non-brand, then allocating another £800 a month to bid on their own name against zero real competition.

The logic gets dressed up as "protecting brand real estate" or "owning the full SERP." Sometimes it is just an agency padding spend to hit a retainer threshold.

Here is what the data actually shows when you dig into it. Brand CPCs are already low. Impression share is already near 100 percent organically for navigational queries. The incremental clicks you buy are mostly people who were going to your site anyway.

When brand bidding is genuinely worth it

There are real cases for brand bidding. We are not arguing the budget should always be zero.

• A competitor is bidding aggressively on your brand terms and you need to push them down or below the fold
• An organic ranking has been temporarily demoted (algorithm update, indexing issue, manual penalty) and you need to maintain the top result
• A product launch where you need tight control over the landing page message and you cannot guarantee the right page ranks organically
• You have a partner network that bids on your brand and you want to maintain priority over them
• Your brand name is generic enough to be a real query, not just a navigational one

Outside those scenarios, the spend usually moves better elsewhere.

The two-week test

The cleanest way to find out whether your brand campaign is actually doing anything is to pause it for two weeks during a low-risk period. Not Black Friday, not your highest-traffic month, but a quiet stretch where small variance is acceptable.

Watch:

• Direct traffic in GA4 for the period vs the matching prior period
• Branded organic clicks in Search Console
• Total revenue from organic and direct combined
• Conversions in CRM if your sales cycle is short enough

Most accounts see no meaningful change. Some see a slight uptick because that budget moved to prospecting and brought in incremental users.

A small minority see a real drop, and those accounts have a legitimate reason to keep brand running. Either a competitor is bidding aggressively (check auction insights), or branded organic was not as dominant as the team assumed (check Search Console click share).

Why brand campaigns persist even when they should not

The uncomfortable truth is that brand campaigns often exist because they make ROAS look good, not because they drive growth.

A brand-term conversion at £0.30 CPC is the cheapest conversion in the account. Including brand in blended ROAS reporting pulls the average up substantially. Excluding it would force a harder conversation about what the prospecting and demand-capture spend is actually returning.

For agencies on percent-of-spend retainers, the incentive points the wrong way. More spend equals more fee. Brand bidding adds spend without adding work. Few clients audit it.

For in-house teams, the metric pressure is similar. Higher reported ROAS keeps the paid-media budget defensible at the next quarterly review.

The result is a line item that quietly absorbs five to fifteen percent of total budget in many accounts, with no evidence it is doing anything other than retitling organic conversions as paid ones.

What to actually do

• Calculate what percentage of your Google Ads spend goes to branded search. If it is over 10 percent on an account without an active competitive threat on the brand, audit it.
• Run the two-week pause test on a quiet period. Document the result. The first time you do this, the answer will probably surprise you.
• Move the saved budget into prospecting or remarketing, not into another brand-adjacent campaign. The point is to see what the budget can do where it is needed, not to redistribute it within the same demand-capture layer.
• Set up a competitor-bidding monitor (auction insights, weekly), so if a real competitor enters the brand auction you can react. The test is not "should brand budget be zero forever", it is "is brand budget doing anything right now".
• Report branded ROAS separately from non-branded in monthly reviews. The two numbers tell different stories and merging them obscures both.

What does your brand spend look like as a percentage of total Google Ads budget?

If you want help running the two-week test on your account, or working out whether your current brand budget is defensible, book a free audit and we will pull the numbers before any change is made.