A brand campaign is a search campaign that is targeted to your brand name keywords.

You may wonder why a brand campaign is important if you already rank organically for your brand name.

It's because anyone who clicks your brand ad before converting will have their data collected by Google.

This data on search interests, demographic etc… can then be used by Google to target your cold-traffic campaigns better with it's smart bidding.

If you're acquiring a lot of traffic with Meta campaigns, a lot of this traffic will convert on your brand campaign. (N.b. this is why your in-app ROAS in Google should not be the sole influence in your decision making, it's just a small part of the entire customer journey)

Yes you're paying twice in some cases for a conversion that will happen anyway, but the data you collect is much more valuable.

People can search for your brand name while still in the decision-making stage.

In your ad copy you can promote any offers that you're running, this might sway a consumers decision, and net you a customer.

99% of the time you're better off with manual bidding.

You'll drop your CPCs even lower than they currently are.

Use the "Manual CPC" bid strategy, find your bid settings in your campaign settings.

Set your starting bid 20% lower than your 30-day avg. CPC value you've been getting with smart bidding.

Over a 7-14-30 day period, measure your CPC vs. your impression share.

You want to find a CPC where you're getting high (80%-100%) impression share for the lowest cost.

Some branded queries will have different intentions, so you should segment these like you do for cold searches.

You're probably over-spending on brand.

Run an incremental test.

Start with little spend, then medium, then high spend to what yours should be relative to your total media mix.

This is more applicable to brands that are spending $5k+ on other paid platforms.

And should be a longer-term test that you run (monthly), while you're optimising your media mix, and not making a lot of changes to spend elsewhere.

For example you might be seeing a 3.4x MER right now.

Allocate 20% less on your brand campaign.

You might see that your MER drops, as that brand campaign was doing well to convert warm traffic.

Or you might see an increase, as your spending less on brand, but in fact that traffic was going to convert anyway and has returned through 'organic' and 'direct' channels.

You should always keep a brand campaign running due to the signals and user data that Google is tracking from people who are searching/converting on your brand terms.

Take the time to update it for your new offers, promotions, time of the year etc…

Non-brand search terms can sneak in.

Add the 'Quality Score' column to your dashboard.

Navigate to your "search keywords' report and make sure that the keywords in your campaign are at least a 7 in terms of quality score.

Exclude those that are below, or increase their quality score.

Your existing customers will convert via email and searching directly for your store.

Save that spend to focus on acquiring new customers (and training your algorithm for those customers)

Navigate to your "Audiences" report for your brand search campaign.

At the bottom of the page there is an "Exclusions" section.

Upload your customer list from Shopify to Google ads, and exclude that list here.

Export your auction insights to see how competitors are bidding against you.

Look at your weekly and monthly insights for this.

You can then use this data against them by upping your bids (forcing them to spend more to rank) and to setup direct/indirect competitor campaigns.