Should you pay Google every time somebody searches for your business by name and clicks your ad? It feels a bit daft. They were looking for you. You’re probably top of the free results anyway.
I get asked this regularly, and it’s a fair question. The answer for most businesses is yes, a little, under control, and with the results kept well away from everything else in your reporting.
That last part is the bit that usually goes wrong.
What brand bidding means
Bidding on your brand means running Google Ads on searches for your own business name. Someone types in your company name, and your ad appears above the normal results.
Those clicks tend to be cheap, because your ad is very relevant to the search and there’s usually not much competition for it. They also convert well, because the person was already looking for you.
Which is exactly why brand advertising can make an account look much healthier than it is.
Why this matters for your budget
The commercial question is simple. Of the people who click your brand ad and buy, how many would have bought anyway through the free listing underneath it?
If the answer is most of them, a chunk of your ad budget is paying for sales you’d have had for free. That’s not a disaster if the spend is small and you know about it. It becomes a problem when brand results are mixed in with everything else, because they drag up the average and hide the campaigns that aren’t pulling their weight.
I see this in a lot of the accounts I audit. The monthly report shows a healthy return overall. Split out the brand searches, and the rest of the account, the part that’s meant to be finding new customers, is barely breaking even.
The case for bidding on your name
There are some good reasons to do it, and they’re worth being honest about.
Competitors can bid on your name. If someone else is advertising on searches for your business, their ad can sit above your free listing. A brand campaign keeps you at the top of the page for your own name.
You control the message. Your free listing shows whatever Google decides to pull from your website. An ad lets you choose the wording and send people to a specific page, such as a current offer, a service page or a booking form.
It takes up space. On a phone, an ad plus your free listing fills most of the screen. That leaves less room for anyone else.
It’s cheap insurance. For most businesses, brand clicks cost a fraction of what non-brand clicks cost. A small brand budget is rarely the thing breaking an account.
The case against
You might be paying for free traffic. If nobody else is bidding on your name and you rank first organically, the ad may simply move clicks from the free listing to the paid one.
It flatters the reporting. This is the big one. Brand campaigns make the overall return look better than it really is, and that can hide real problems elsewhere.
Automation loves it. Performance Max campaigns, Google’s automated campaign type, will happily pick up brand searches if you let them, because they’re cheap conversions. That’s one of the reasons I’m cautious about Performance Max reports. You need to know what share of the results are people who’d already decided to buy from you.
How I’d decide for your business
I’d look at three things before recommending either way.
1. Is anyone else bidding on your name? Search for your business name on your phone, a few times on different days. If competitors’ ads appear, you’ve got a reason to run a brand campaign. If nobody ever does, the case is weaker.
2. How much is it costing? Ask for the spend on brand campaigns over the last three months, separate from everything else. If it’s a small fraction of the budget, it’s rarely worth agonising over. If it’s a large share, that needs a proper conversation.
3. What happens when you pause it? If you want a real answer to the "would they have bought anyway" question, the cleanest way is a short test. Pause brand ads for a few weeks in a normal trading period, then compare total enquiries or sales from search, paid and free together, with the same weeks before. If the total barely moves, the free listing was doing the work. If it drops, the ads were earning their keep. Don’t run this test in your busiest month, and don’t run it if a competitor is actively bidding on your name.
The setup I’d recommend for most businesses
For most of the businesses I work with, the answer ends up somewhere in the middle.
→ A small, separate brand campaign with its own budget
→ Brand terms excluded from the other search campaigns, so they can’t pick up cheap name searches and look better than they are
→ A close eye on how much brand traffic Performance Max is taking credit for
→ Reporting that shows brand and non-brand results side by side, never blended
That fourth point matters most. Judge your brand campaign on whether it’s protecting your name at a sensible cost. Judge everything else on whether it’s bringing in customers who didn’t already know you. They’re doing different jobs, so they need different measures.
This is the same thinking I apply when I’m looking after a client’s whole budget. At Rucklidge Law, I run Google Ads to capture high-intent searches from people looking for help, alongside the website, video, social and email. Knowing which parts of that are bringing in new people, and which are catching people who already know the firm, is what lets the money move to what’s working.
What to do this week
Search for your own name. On your phone, a few times this week. Note whether competitors appear and what your own ad and listing look like.
Ask for the brand split. Email whoever runs your ads and ask for last quarter’s spend and results with brand searches separated from everything else, including inside Performance Max. This is one of the questions in my nine checks for your Google Ads, and it’s often the most revealing.
Look at the non-brand number on its own. That’s the figure that tells you whether your advertising is finding new customers. If it’s weaker than you’d assumed, at least you now know where to look.
Questions like this come up in almost every account review I do as a Google Ads specialist and fractional CMO. If you’d like someone to go through your brand and non-brand numbers with you, book a free consultation. Sometimes the answer is that everything’s set up sensibly and you can stop wondering. That’s a perfectly good outcome too.