“Why pay for ads on our own name? People will find us anyway.” We hear this question all the time. The short answer is in the video; here is the longer one, checked against Google’s help and including the places where practitioners disagree with each other.
First, the limits of this text. Google gives no official figures such as “a brand click is this many times cheaper”, so we don’t quote any. Where Google’s help speaks, we refer to it (we checked it on 7 October 2026), and where it is our own experience or the opinion of practitioners, we say so.
What a brand campaign is
It is advertising that shows on searches that include your company name. Someone types your company name, or “name + price”, into Google and sees your ad above the results. These people have already heard of you, so this is the warmest traffic you have.
1. Competitors can advertise on your name
Under Google’s trademark policy, Google does not restrict the use of someone else’s trademark as a keyword. Put simply, a competitor can buy an impression on a search for your name. The person is looking for you, but sees someone else’s ad first, and some of those customers go there.
A trademark owner can complain, but the complaint is about the ad text: Google reviews, among other things, the use of the trademark in an ad from a direct competitor. Keywords are not on that list.
How to check it yourself. Google Ads has a report called “Auction insights”: Campaigns > open a campaign > “Auction insights”. The “Overlap rate” metric shows how often another advertiser’s ad received an impression when your ad also received one. Google adds two caveats: the report doesn’t show data when your impression share is below 10%, and a competitor’s impression share in your report may differ from what the competitor sees in their own. The help does not say what overlap is already worrying; practitioners name different thresholds, so we look at the trend.
If there is no brand campaign, there is no report either. In that case, type your name into Google on your phone and see who is above you. Don’t click the ads: a click on someone else’s ad costs its owner money, and a click on yours costs you.
2. It is cheap traffic
According to Google’s help, ad position depends on the bid and on the quality of the ad and landing page, and “higher quality ads can often lead to lower CPCs”. An ad for your name answers the search exactly and leads to your site, so in our experience such a click is usually clearly cheaper than a click on a generic search. That is experience, not an official figure: benchmarks from different sources vary, so we don’t use them.
The dispute: why bother if you are already first in the free results? Some practitioners say the click will simply move from free to paid, and the money is wasted. Others say that if competitors buy your name, a paid impression protects you from losses. There is a fresh 2025 study that measured the effect of brand ads on Google in real tests: among advertisers with high competition for their own name, a significant lift was measured for 82%, and among those with little competition, for 35%. The authors did not say how many tests were analysed, and the median test lasted 14 days, so this is a guide, not a law. The conclusion: if nobody else is on your name, a pause can be tested; if competitors are there, switching off is risky.
Don’t test it by switching off blindly. If you want to, pause the brand campaign for a few weeks and compare not clicks but the total number of enquiries from ads and free search together. The duration is our own advice.
3. It is an awareness gauge
Google’s help defines impression share as the percentage of impressions your ads received compared with the total number they could have received. If you hold this share steady, growth in impressions, clicks and enquiries means people are searching for you more often. The share did not change, so demand for your name itself grew. This is our conclusion, not Google’s statement.
How do you hold the share steady? Google Ads has a bidding strategy called “Target impression share”. It has three placement options: “Top”, “Absolute top” and “Anywhere”, plus a “Max CPC bid limit”. The help says directly that the strategy can be useful for campaigns with brand terms, and gives an example with a 100% goal.
The contradiction. Practitioners advise against setting exactly 100%: in their words, the last few percent of impressions sharply raise the cost per click, so the goal is set slightly lower. Google names no such threshold. It only warns against setting the bid limit too low: then the strategy cannot reach its goal.
What to watch: the campaign’s impression share and the shares lost to budget and to ad rank. Loss to budget is cured with money, loss to rank is not. One more caution from Google’s help: small fluctuations over time do not by themselves mean you need to act.
If nobody has heard of you yet, a brand campaign shows nothing: there is nobody to show to. Demand has to appear first.
4. The response to billboards and targeted ads
Did you launch billboards, social media ads or video? More people remembered your name and started searching for you on Google. You see it in the brand campaign: impressions on your name grow. Billboards or video do not bring enquiries in Google by themselves, but searches for your name usually appear after them.
Just allow for two factors. The first is season: at the peak, demand grows on its own, and your ads deserve less credit than it seems. Compare with the same period last year and with launch dates. The second is negative news about you: it moves these numbers too, and not in the direction you would like.
Pitfalls from practice
The brand flatters the reports. Brand searches usually give the best figures in the account. If you mix them with the other campaigns, the average cost per enquiry looks great, while the cost of an enquiry from new people is hidden. Practitioners advise looking at the brand separately from the rest of the advertising, and we agree.
Automatic campaigns take the brand. Performance Max (an automatic campaign that shows across all Google surfaces) also catches brand searches and records enquiries that would have come anyway. According to Google’s help, if a query matches an exact match keyword, the Search campaign containing that keyword is prioritised over Performance Max. There is a caveat: when the Search campaign is budget-limited, Performance Max may occasionally serve on those terms too. “Brand exclusions” exist for this: Campaigns > Campaigns > Settings > select a campaign > “Additional settings” > “Brand exclusions”. Depending on the interface version the path may differ slightly; in Search campaigns, Google has been moving brand settings into the AI Max panel since 27 May 2025.
The name in only one spelling. A typical mistake in account management, according to practitioners: brand searches added in only one language or alphabet. You miss people who type your name in another alphabet, in another language, or with a typo, and somebody else catches them. This is easy to check in the search terms report, which our article on three checks covers.
What to ask your contractor
- Do we have a brand campaign? If not, why not?
- Who else shows on our name? What does “Auction insights” show?
- What is our impression share on the brand, and how much do we lose to budget and to rank?
- Is the brand in a separate campaign and separate in reports, or mixed with the rest?
- Is the brand excluded in Performance Max or not?
Summary
In our experience, a brand campaign is worth turning on: the traffic is cheap, it protects you from competitors and shows whether awareness is growing. To be fair, the dispute about its value continues: the 2025 study says the effect depends on whether competitors bid on your name. Keep three things in mind:
- check who shows on your name;
- hold the impression share steady and watch impressions, clicks and enquiries;
- count the brand separately and allow for season and news.
You can read how we run campaigns in the search advertising and Performance Max sections.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account, tell you who shows on your name and whether a brand campaign makes sense.