Your agency report says ACoS is 14% and sales are up. Sounds like a good month.
By Elizabeth Greene · October 5, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Your agency report says ACoS is 14% and sales are up.
Sounds like a good month.
Ask them to split that into two lines.
Branded and non-branded. Spend, sales, ACoS, for each.
A lot of them can't do it.
Honestly, it's because the account was never set up to answer the question.
Branded terms are scattered across non-branded campaigns.
Product targeting for defense is sitting in the same campaign as discovery.
One optimization target running across all of it.
If branded and non-branded share a rule set, your algorithm is scaling shoppers who already typed your name and pulling back on the terms that were supposed to bring you new ones.
Those branded campaigns make you spend on the market share you already have.
We get into messy accounts all the time.
Someone put a branded term in a non-branded campaign, that happens.
So we built a system that looks target by target, regardless of what the campaign is named, catches those, and applies a separate, more conservative rule set to them.
I never want to be losing money converting a shopper who was already interested in the brand.
Ask for both lines.
If your report only has one, you can't tell whether last month was growth or defense.
What did your non-branded spend do last month, on its own line?