Is Branded Search Inflating Your ROAS?
Branded search ads, the ads on your own company name, report the best returns in the account. Here is why that number misleads, and how to test what they add.
Key takeaways
- Ads on your own brand name report high ROAS because the person searching was already looking for you.
- eBay’s field experiment, published in Econometrica in 2015, found its brand keyword ads had no measurable short-term benefit.
- Report non-brand ROAS on its own, and test brand ads with a time-based or regional pause.
In most Google Ads accounts we audit, the campaign with the best return on ad spend (ROAS) is the one bidding on the company’s own name. That figure is usually the least trustworthy number in the account. Someone who types your brand name into Google has already decided to find you. The ad gets the click, and the reporting gives the ad the sale.
What the eBay experiment found
The best-known test of this comes from eBay. Economists Thomas Blake, Chris Nosko and Steven Tadelis ran large field experiments on eBay’s paid search, published in Econometrica in 2015 as “Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large-Scale Field Experiment”. When eBay stopped bidding on its brand keywords on Microsoft and Yahoo search, the traffic that had come through the ads arrived through the organic listings instead. The authors report that brand keyword ads had no measurable short-term benefit.
eBay is an unusually well-known brand, so your result could differ. That is the reason to test it on your own account rather than assume either way.
How branded search inflates blended ROAS
Brand clicks are cheap, because few advertisers compete for your name, and they convert at a high rate, because the searcher already intends to buy or inquire. Mix them into a campaign or account total and the blended ROAS rises. That blended figure then justifies non-brand spend that, on its own, loses money.
Performance Max adds a second layer. It can serve ads on brand searches unless you apply brand exclusions, which Google added to Performance Max in 2023. Without them, a Performance Max campaign can report strong results that are largely your existing customers looking you up.
Separating brand from non-brand in your reporting
- Move every keyword containing your company or product name into a dedicated brand campaign.
- Add your brand terms as negative keywords in all non-brand Search campaigns, and apply brand exclusions to Performance Max.
- Report non-brand ROAS on its own line. Treat it as the real measure of whether paid search is finding new customers.
- Report brand campaign results separately and label them as demand capture, not demand creation.
Testing whether your brand ads add anything
Pause the brand campaign for two to four weeks, or pause it in a set of regions while it keeps running in others. Track total conversions from brand searches, paid and organic combined, against the period or regions where the ads ran. If the total holds steady, the ads were mostly collecting credit and the budget can move to non-brand campaigns. If the total drops, the ads were protecting real revenue.
Before pausing, open Auction insights for the brand campaign. If competitors are bidding on your name, they will take the top position once you leave it, and the test needs to account for that.
When bidding on your own brand is worth it
Brand campaigns earn their cost in three situations: competitors are bidding on your name, you need to control the message on brand searches (a launch, a price change, a reputation issue), or your organic listing does not rank first for your own name. Outside those cases, a small brand budget is usually enough, and the ROAS it reports should never decide how much you spend elsewhere.
For the account settings that sit around this problem, see our Google Ads audit checklist. For SaaS companies, our attribution guide covers how branded search distorts pipeline reporting.
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