Brand terms are a defensive scam we all play along with

When I show clients their blended ROAS, they're usually proud of it.

When I isolate non-brand ROAS and show it to them separately, they go quiet.

The gap is revealing. Brand search terms convert at 8-15%. Non-brand terms convert at 1-3%. Blending them together produces a number that looks respectable but hides how much of the "performance" is just people who already knew the brand and were going to buy regardless.

This is the brand term shell game. Everyone plays it. Most people don't admit it.

What's actually happening

When someone searches "[Brand Name] safety labels" they've already done some awareness work. They know the brand. The search is essentially a navigational query — they're trying to get to your website.

If you didn't have a brand search campaign running, most of those users would find you organically anyway. You're on page one for your brand name. That's not hard to achieve.

So what does the brand search campaign actually do? It ensures you own the top spot above the organic result. You pay $2-6 per click for something that would have come to you for free.

Sometimes that's justified. If a competitor is actively bidding on your brand terms, they'll take that top spot if you vacate it. In that case, defensive bidding makes sense.

But in markets where competitors aren't bidding on your brand? You're paying a toll to Google for traffic you already earned.

How agencies use this

Agencies aren't stupid. They know brand terms inflate performance metrics.

When they're managing your campaigns and reporting ROAS monthly, they want that number to look good. Including brand terms in the blended ROAS makes it look good. It also gives them something to "optimize" — brand bids, brand negatives, brand ad copy — that generates activity without taking much risk.

I've audited accounts where brand terms made up 30-40% of total conversion volume. Remove them from the ROAS calculation and the account looks significantly worse. The agency knew this. It was never brought up proactively.

Ask your agency directly: "Can you show me ROAS segmented into brand vs non-brand?" If they can't produce it in 24 hours, something is wrong.

The cannibalization math

Here's the specific issue with branded navigational terms like "Brady marking systems" or "Seton safety labels."

Your organic listing is already on page one for these queries. Your brand search ad shows above it. When a user clicks the paid ad instead of the organic result, you've paid for a click that would have cost you nothing.

The question isn't whether the conversion happened. It's whether the paid ad was responsible for the conversion or whether the organic result would have delivered it anyway.

In most mature B2B brands, organic captures 70-90% of traffic in the absence of a paid brand ad. The paid ad captures the remaining 10-30%, plus steals some from organic.

I ran the experiment on one of our brands for 30 days. Turned off brand search in a controlled region. Organic traffic from brand queries went up 15%. Total brand conversions dropped by 8%. Net cost savings: $14K in that period.

The script approach

My preferred solution isn't turning off brand search entirely. It's making brand bidding conditional.

I use a script that monitors Auction Insights daily. If a specific competitor enters the auction for our brand terms and achieves a meaningful impression share (above 15%), the script automatically turns on brand bidding in that market.

When they leave, the script turns it back off.

This means we're only paying for brand protection when we actually need it. In months where competitors aren't bidding on our brand, we save the spend. In months where they are, we defend automatically.

The setup takes about half a day. The savings over a year are meaningful.

The honest conversation

The reason this persists is that nobody wants to explain to a VP why ROAS just dropped 30%.

"We restructured reporting to exclude brand terms, which we believe were overstating our actual acquisition performance."

That's a hard sentence to say. But it's the right sentence. It leads to better budget decisions. And it leads to an honest picture of where your non-brand campaigns actually stand.

Pull your non-brand ROAS. Look at it directly. Then decide if you're managing the account you think you're managing.