A brand campaign (or branding campaign) is an advertising strategy focused on bidding on and showing ads to people who directly search for your company name, your specific products, or variants of your commercial name.

Although many advertisers consider bidding on their own brand unnecessary because they already appear in organic results, Google actively seeks to place advertisers on every search query. Therefore, if someone searches for your brand, it is very likely that a competitor will appear with an ad above you if you do not bid on yourself. The advantage of brand campaigns is that they typically have very cheap CPCs; Google "protects" your own brand this way. Similarly, bidding on competitors is significantly more expensive.During the session, we discussed that if there is sufficient brand search volume, creating a brand campaign is recommended (provided there is a minimum budget).

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What we DO recommend:

Separate brand traffic into an exclusive campaign:

• Never mix brand terms with generic keywords. Brand searches have very high click-through rates (CTR) and very low costs-per-click (CPC); combining them will distort global metrics and algorithm optimization.
• Cover the main variants: Include your commercial name, common spelling mistakes (typos), combinations with flagship products, and your domain (brand, brand reviews, brand com, etc.).
• Fully leverage assets (extensions): Take up as much visual screen real estate as possible (especially on mobile). Add sitelinks to key pages (contact, offers, login), callouts, call assets, and images to push organic results and competitor ads further down.
• Set up an exhaustive negative keyword list: Exclude terms that attract clicks without purchase intent if they are not commercially valuable to you: "jobs", "careers", "log in" (if paying for each recurring user click is inefficient), or competitor brand names to prevent unwanted cross-traffic.

Add negatives frequently through Dolnai by reviewing your campaign traffic in the cloud word section.

• Control costs with bid caps: Even when using automated strategies like Target Impression Share (e.g., aiming for 90-95% at the absolute top), always establish a maximum CPC limit to prevent the algorithm from overpaying in low-competition auctions.
• Exclude your brand from other campaigns: This prevents brand traffic from entering other campaigns where you would pay higher CPCs.‍

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Common mistakes to avoid:

• Do not use broad match: Avoid broad match on its own. Use phrase match or exact match. Otherwise, Google will match your brand with competitor searches or generic industry terms, driving up spend unnecessarily.
• Pay attention to the LP destination for your clicks: Avoid directing traffic to the homepage unless it is strictly conversion-focused. The destination LP should always remain focused on facilitating conversion.
• Do not turn it off assuming SEO covers everything: If your competitors bid on your name, they will appear above your rank-one organic result. If you are not there to defend it, they will capture a portion of your most qualified traffic.
• Do not settle for generic ad copy: Use the ad to communicate updates, active promotions, official guarantees ("Official Website", "Free 24h Shipping"), or value propositions that your organic snippet cannot display as quickly or flexibly.
• Do not let it cannibalize your acquisition metrics: Do not measure the success of your prospecting/acquisition strategy by blending brand results into it. Branding users already know you; analyze the return of these campaigns independently from generic or prospecting campaigns.

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