When auditing accounts, one of the most common mistakes companies make is allowing brand and non-brand traffic to live together in the same campaigns. This is textbook poor PPC management.
Whether it’s Performance Max, Search, or Standard Shopping, blending brand and non-brand traffic inflates reported ROAS while limiting your ability to scale revenue.
If your goal is to maximize short-term ROAS, automation will naturally gravitate toward branded searches. Why? Because they’re cheaper, convert at higher rates, and are an easy win for the algorithm.
Google will take the easiest possible route to achieve the goal you’re asking it to. Those users were often already looking for you. So why are you paying for them? Why lump brand traffic in with campaigns designed to drive incremental growth?
If your objective is to grow the business, acquire new customers, and increase market share, you need to know how much of your budget is creating demand rather than capturing existing demand.
The problem with blended automation
When brand and non-brand traffic are combined, a few things happen beneath the surface:
- Brand searches often consume the majority of the budget.
- Overall ROAS looks stronger than it actually is.
- Non-brand products and categories struggle to gain visibility.
- Budget shifts toward the easiest conversions instead of the biggest growth opportunities.
- Brand campaigns can take credit for other media channels (CTV, programmatic, etc.) without an MMM in place.
This creates a dangerous feedback loop. Automation sees brand traffic performing well, allocates more budget to it, reports excellent efficiency, and reinforces the same behavior.
Meanwhile, opportunities to reach new customers become increasingly limited.
Uncover the keywords, ads, landing pages, and strategies driving your competitors’ paid search success—and find your next opportunity to outperform them.
A case study in incremental growth
Before working together, one client’s Google Ads account was heavily weighted toward branded traffic.
Before our team took over, brand and non-brand campaigns were blended, product segmentation was minimal, and a significant portion of spend flowed toward branded searches.
While overall PPC performance appeared healthy, much of the revenue came from customers who were already familiar with the brand.
When they turned to us to improve performance, their goals were clear:
- Increase total business revenue.
- Acquire more new customers.
- Grow non-brand revenue.
- Reduce reliance on branded search.
Instead of optimizing for the highest reported ROAS, we restructured the account around growth. Yes, that meant our overall ROAS would decline, but that was exactly the goal.
How we restructured the account for growth
1. Separate brand and non-brand
The first step was isolating branded traffic from non-branded campaigns.
This immediately gave us clearer visibility into budget allocation and how each traffic source contributed to overall performance.
Brand campaigns remained important. We weren’t trying to eliminate them, but they were no longer allowed to absorb budget that could be used to generate incremental growth.
We reduced the branded campaign budget to a small percentage of overall spend, allowing the vast majority of dollars to flow to campaigns better suited to drive incremental growth and acquire new customers.
2. Build granular product segmentation
Rather than relying on broad Shopping structures, we rebuilt the non-brand campaign structure using Standard Shopping campaigns with significantly more product segmentation.
This allowed us to:
- Allocate budget by product priority.
- Bid differently across product groups.
- Invest more aggressively in strategic categories.
- Scale products that previously received very little visibility.
Instead of treating every product the same, the account could prioritize the areas with the greatest growth potential.
This is another common challenge with automation. Left on its own, Google’s algorithms naturally allocate more budget toward products that already generate the strongest performance. While that can maximize short-term efficiency, it often leaves lower-volume products, emerging categories, or strategic product lines with little opportunity to gain traction.
When an entire catalog is grouped into a single campaign, it’s nearly impossible to prioritize products based on business objectives. You’re essentially asking Google to decide what’s most important, and its answer isn’t always aligned with yours.
By segmenting products around business goals, we regained that control. We could intentionally invest in high-priority categories, newer products, or underperforming product groups with untapped potential, forcing the algorithm to compete in the areas where growth mattered most.
3. Use Performance Max for what it does best
Rather than asking Performance Max to do everything, we assigned it a specific role.
We leveraged Performance Max’s New Customer Acquisition setting to focus on acquiring incremental customers while Standard Shopping maintained greater control over product-level bidding and budget allocation.
This created a balance between automation and manual control instead of relying entirely on one campaign type.
The results: Looking beyond paid search performance
On paper, one “important” metric looked worse.
Google PPC revenue declined 25% year over year, representing approximately $2.3 million less in paid search revenue.
If you looked only at Google Ads reporting, it would appear performance had declined.
But that wasn’t the full story.
Because we intentionally reduced our dependence on branded paid traffic, more branded searches naturally shifted to organic listings.
As a result:
- Google organic revenue increased 99% year over year.
- Combined Google PPC and organic revenue increased 15% year over year.
- New customer acquisition increased 20% year over year.
Instead of paying for customers who likely would’ve found the brand anyway, we allowed organic search to capture more branded demand while investing paid media in expanding the customer base.
As a result, the business grew even though paid revenue alone decreased.
Why brand spend still matters
Everything we’ve discussed up to this point might make it sound like brand spend is something to avoid. But that’s not the case.
For most retailers, brand campaigns are a necessary part of an account strategy. In highly competitive industries, if someone searches for your brand, the last thing you want is a competitor’s Shopping ad appearing instead of your own products.
If your brand name includes a product term (e.g., Mattress Firm or Guitar Center), protecting your brand is even more important because competitors can more easily match branded queries.
The challenge with Shopping campaigns is that Standard Shopping doesn’t provide a way to explicitly target only branded search queries. That means you need to get creative because you still need a way to protect the demand you’ve worked so hard to build.
We’ve found a workaround: Create brand-focused Standard Shopping campaigns that:
- Include only the relevant products.
- Apply a robust negative keyword list (often using our non-brand Search keywords as exact-match negatives).
- Set an aggressive tROAS target.
Google naturally favors high-converting queries, and nothing converts as easily as brand traffic. As a result, the majority of spend shifts to brand queries when a high target is set.
In some cases, we also apply a portfolio bid strategy with a maximum CPC limit to the brand campaign. Because non-brand queries generally drive higher CPCs, the cap helps filter out unwanted non-brand traffic. So yes, in many cases, brand spend is necessary. You just need to make sure your ad dollars have boundaries.
To do that, define what success looks like. Maybe it’s maintaining a certain impression share on branded searches or hitting a specific ROAS target while protecting your brand from competitors.
Whatever the objective, keep brand and non-brand strategies distinct so you can accurately measure performance and confidently invest in the areas driving incremental growth.
See where competitors are investing, which keywords drive their results, and how to capture more of the market.
The metrics that matter aren’t always in Google Ads
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is evaluating paid media in a vacuum.
If reducing branded paid spend increases branded organic traffic, that’s not inherently a loss. In many cases, it’s exactly what should happen.
The goal isn’t to maximize paid revenue at all costs. The goal is to maximize total business growth. Sometimes that means accepting lower paid media metrics in exchange for stronger overall business performance.
Automation is incredibly powerful, but it optimizes toward the signals you give it. If brand and non-brand traffic are blended, the algorithm will often chase the easiest conversions rather than the most incremental ones.
Separating branded traffic, building a thoughtful product segmentation strategy, and giving automation a clearly defined role gives you much better visibility into performance while creating room for sustainable growth.
The strongest Google Ads accounts don’t rely solely on automation or solely on manual control. They combine both, using automation where it excels while maintaining enough structure to ensure budgets drive real business outcomes rather than simply capturing demand that already exists. That’s why we consider the 25% “performance loss” in the example above a success.
https://searchengineland.com/separating-brand-non-brand-campaigns-roas-484080