If you're doing branded defense, the target you set on it matters more than the
By Elizabeth Greene · September 28, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
If you're doing branded defense, the target you set on it matters more than the campaign you put it in.
A lot of accounts pull the terms out and stop there.
You pull your branded terms into their own campaigns. Good.
That's step one and honestly a lot of accounts don't even get that far, especially on the product targeting side where defensive ASIN targets are just sitting in a general campaign.
But then the optimization runs across the whole account at one target. Say 25%.
And branded, which converts at 6%, now gets read as your best performer.
So the algorithm feeds it. Every time.
That's what an algorithm does when it only looks at performance and nothing else.
Now your budget is going to shoppers who already typed your brand name into the search bar.
What I want on branded is a lower ACoS target than anything else in the account.
Why am I overpaying to convert someone who was already looking for me?
It doesn't make sense.
Different campaigns, different rule set, more conservative, capped.
And the same logic applies everywhere else:
→ Auto campaigns: keep the target low. Never understood why people tolerate a high one. Sponsored Display: no. If you want retargeting, go run DSP.
→ Exact match ranking: this is where you tolerate a higher target, because you're buying velocity. Sponsored Brands Video: depends what you're using it for.
Run one uniform target across all of that and you end up decreasing bids on the ranking keywords you need to tolerate a higher ACoS on, while the bids go up on things you shouldn't be touching.
And the naming convention will lie to you.
I've looked at what's actually being targeted inside campaigns labeled non-branded and found branded keywords and branded ASINs sitting in there. So when we bucket branded, we look at the targets themselves, keywords and products.
A label on its own caps nothing, and your spend keeps running.
Brand defense makes you pay for the market share you already have.
That's fine by me if it's capped, and honestly I think most accounts have never actually checked.
What's your branded spend sitting at right now versus where you think it is?