An operator’s perspective on improving efficiency, control, and real performance
Most branded campaigns look efficient. Very few are actually optimized.
And in most accounts, that gap represents real, measurable profit that is being left on the table.
Branded search is usually the highest-ROAS part of an account, which makes it easy to ignore. When something is consistently delivering results, the natural instinct is to focus energy elsewhere. The problem is that branded campaigns tend to drift when they are not actively managed. CPCs creep up, query quality softens, structure becomes less intentional, and over time you end up paying more than you should for traffic you likely would have captured anyway.
Almost every improvement we make in branded campaigns comes down to one idea: regaining control. Control over CPCs, control over which queries you are actually paying for, control over how different types of branded intent are handled, and control over how other campaign types interact with branded demand. When that control is in place, branded campaigns become one of the most predictable and efficient levers in the account. When it isn’t, they quietly become more expensive than they should be.
1. Reset CPCs and Take Back Control
The first place I typically look when evaluating a branded campaign is CPC, and more often than not it is higher than it needs to be. This is usually tied to over-reliance on automated bidding strategies like tROAS. Those strategies can work well in other parts of the account, but in branded campaigns they often introduce a slow and steady form of inefficiency. Because branded traffic converts so well, the system has room to increase CPCs while still hitting efficiency targets.
Over time, that leads to a situation where you are simply paying more for the same demand.
I’ve seen this repeatedly. In one account, branded CPCs had gradually increased even though there was very little meaningful competition. Nothing looked obviously wrong because the campaign was still performing well on paper, but once we moved to a more controlled bidding approach and started managing bids directly, CPCs dropped by roughly 30 percent with no loss in impression share or revenue.
In another case, we found Google had spent more than $40 per click on long-tail branded queries with no competition. There was no strategic reason to pay that much. The system simply pushed CPCs higher because it could still maintain performance targets.
That’s usually the moment where it becomes clear that branded campaigns don’t self-correct. If you’re not managing CPCs, you’re just accepting whatever price the system decides to charge.
2. Separate Core Brand Intent From Everything Else
Not all branded queries behave the same way, but many campaigns treat them as if they do. A search for your exact brand name is fundamentally different from a search that includes modifiers like “coupon,” “deal,” or “promotion,” and those differences matter.
Those modifier-based queries often attract competition from coupon and affiliate sites, which can significantly inflate CPCs and change the auction dynamics. When these terms are blended into your core campaign, they tend to drive up costs and make performance harder to interpret.
We typically separate these into their own campaigns or segments so they can be managed with their own bidding logic and expectations. Just as importantly, they should land on pages that actually match user intent. If someone is searching for a coupon and you send them to a generic homepage, they will almost always continue searching elsewhere.
If you don’t control that experience, someone else will.
More broadly, separating clean, high-intent brand traffic from anything that introduces ambiguity gives you better control and cleaner data. This is a core part of how we structure branded campaigns at StatBid because it makes everything downstream easier to manage.
3. Use Impression Share as a Diagnostic, Not a Strategy
Impression share is useful, but it is often misused. We’ve tested Target Impression Share extensively, and in most cases it underperforms manual bidding. The main issue is that it operates at the campaign level, while the reality is that optimal coverage varies significantly by keyword and by type of query.
Some terms justify very aggressive coverage. Others don’t.
When you apply a single target across everything, you lose that nuance and often end up overpaying. In practice, we use impression share to identify gaps, not to blindly fill them. If core brand terms are sitting below where they should be, we address that through selective bid adjustments rather than handing control over to an automated strategy.
Impression share should inform decisions, not make them for you.
4. Build Your Keyword Set From Real Data
Keyword coverage in branded campaigns is almost always incomplete because it is typically treated as a one-time setup task. In reality, it should be an ongoing process grounded in actual search behavior.
The way we approach this is very specific. We pull 16 months of data from Google Search Console and combine it with lifetime search query data from Google Ads, then filter down to branded queries. That gives us a clear view of how users are actually searching.
From there, patterns start to emerge. Misspellings are common. Variations that include your domain name, especially with “.com,” show up more often than expected. In some cases, we’ve even found users searching by phone number.
These are not edge cases. They represent real demand.
Most accounts don’t fully capture this because it requires manual work. It’s not automated and it’s not particularly exciting, but it is one of the most reliable ways to uncover incremental volume that converts well. If you’re not building your keyword set from real data, you are almost certainly leaving demand on the table.
5. Remove Irrelevant Queries Early
Even in well-structured campaigns, irrelevant queries can still enter through close variant matching. The challenge is that they don’t show up as a single obvious issue. Instead, they accumulate slowly over time.
In one account, we found that queries tied to completely different businesses were entering the campaign because of similar brand names. At a glance, they looked relevant. In reality, they had no chance of converting.
Individually, they were small. Collectively, they mattered.
Once we identified the pattern and added negatives to block those terms, performance improved without any changes to bids or structure. This is a good reminder that a lot of efficiency gains come from removing small pockets of waste rather than making large structural changes.
6. Align Landing Pages With Intent
Landing page alignment is one of the simplest ways to improve performance, but it is still frequently overlooked. Many branded campaigns default to sending all traffic to the homepage, which works, but doesn’t fully align with user intent.
When someone searches for your brand alongside a product category, they are telling you exactly what they want. Sending them directly to that category page removes friction and improves the likelihood of conversion. The same applies to promotional queries, where users expect to see offers or discounts.
If they don’t find that quickly, they will continue searching.
In practice, we have seen measurable improvements in conversion rate simply by aligning landing pages more closely with query intent. The traffic does not change, but the experience improves, and that is often enough to drive better outcomes.
7. Control How PMax Interacts With Brand Terms
Performance Max has made branded traffic more complex to manage, and without clear boundaries it can quickly reduce visibility and control.
In most cases, we recommend restricting PMax from serving against branded search queries so that your branded search campaigns remain the primary driver for those terms. That’s where you have the most control and typically the best efficiency.
At the same time, there is an important nuance around Shopping placements. We typically enable branded terms for Shopping within one PMax campaign that has strong product coverage. This ensures your Shopping ads remain present on branded queries and protects against competitors.
You don’t need this across every PMax campaign. One is enough. You just need to protect your position without giving up control.
8. Defend Your Brand Without Overreacting
Competitor bidding on branded terms is normal, but it often leads to overreaction internally. It’s common for someone to search for the brand, see a competitor ad, and immediately want to increase bids across the board.
In some cases, that visibility is influenced by recent browsing behavior, which can make competitors appear more prominent than they actually are.
The right approach is to look at the data. Auction Insights will tell you how often competitors are actually showing up and whether they are meaningfully impacting your visibility.
From there, responses should be targeted. Increase bids where needed, reinforce messaging, and maintain strong coverage on core terms. What doesn’t work is reacting broadly and driving up costs across the entire campaign.
Brand defense should be measured, not reactive.
9. Keep Branded Traffic Isolated
One of the most important structural principles in any account is keeping branded traffic separate from non-branded traffic. When branded queries leak into non-brand campaigns, it distorts performance data and makes it much harder to make good decisions.
I’ve seen accounts where non-brand campaigns looked highly efficient, only to discover that a significant portion of that performance was actually branded traffic. That leads to misallocated budgets and flawed optimization decisions.
The solution is straightforward. Branded terms should be isolated within branded campaigns, and negatives should be applied consistently across non-brand campaigns to prevent overlap. When that separation is clean, performance data becomes much more reliable.
10. Maintain Strict Match Type Control
Match type is one of the most important tools you have for maintaining control in branded campaigns, especially as Google continues to push toward broader matching and automation.
Our default approach is exact match only. That ensures the queries being captured are clearly aligned with branded intent and prevents unnecessary expansion into loosely related searches.
We used to run phrase match for branded campaigns with reasonable success, but that has changed. Today, phrase match often behaves much more like broad match, introducing queries that reduce efficiency. We’ve also tested AI-driven expansion, including AI Max, and consistently saw increases in irrelevant traffic and wasted spend.
When we revert to exact match and rebuild keyword coverage intentionally, performance stabilizes and improves. Once you lose control over match types, it becomes much harder to understand what is actually driving results.
Final Perspective
Most branded campaigns don’t need to be rebuilt. They need to be tightened.
The opportunity is rarely in doing something new. It comes from executing the fundamentals with more discipline. Controlling CPCs instead of accepting them, structuring campaigns around intent instead of blending everything together, expanding keywords based on real data instead of relying on automation, and aligning the user experience with what people are actually searching for are all relatively straightforward changes that tend to produce meaningful results.
When this is done well, the impact shows up quickly. Lower blended CAC, cleaner attribution, and more confidence in how the account is actually performing.
This is why we spend so much time on branded campaigns with clients. The gains are usually immediate and measurable.
Quick Brand Campaign Audit
If you want to quickly assess whether your branded campaigns are optimized, these are the first places to look:
- Are CPCs rising without meaningful competition?
- Are coupon, deal, or promotional queries separated and handled intentionally?
- Is PMax restricted from serving against branded search (with controlled Shopping coverage)?
- Are you running exact match only for core brand campaigns?
- Is impression share below ~85–90% on core brand terms?
- Are brand terms fully negated from non-brand campaigns?
If the answer to several of these is no, there is almost certainly opportunity to improve performance.
Jeff McRitchie leads Strategy, SEO, and Shopify Development at StatBid. With more than two decades of experience building and scaling ecommerce businesses, Jeff brings a founder-operator perspective to growth strategy. He co-founded MyBinding.com and has helped lead multiple companies to successful exits. His leadership experience includes executive roles at MyBinding.com, Buy-Rite Beauty, Biddy Murphy, Messenger Corporation, and Spiral Binding, where he guided digital strategy, operational scaling, and performance marketing transformation.
At StatBid, Jeff focuses on technical SEO, information architecture, paid and organic search alignment, and full-scale Shopify builds and migrations. His approach blends disciplined measurement with practical execution — building scalable acquisition systems, strengthening conversion architecture, and developing ecommerce platforms designed to drive both immediate profitability and long-term enterprise value.
Jeff is known for turning complex growth challenges into clear, prioritized roadmaps that teams can execute with confidence.
