You told me your non-branded spend is 70% of the account. I asked how you knew.
By Elizabeth Greene · October 6, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
You told me your non-branded spend is 70% of the account.
I asked how you knew. You said the campaign names.
That's the part I want to talk about.
Because a campaign called "Non-Branded - Exact" is just a name someone typed in a box.
I opened one of those last month and the targets inside it were branded ASINs.
Your own ASINs.
That's defense.
That's you paying to sit next to yourself on your own detail page, under a campaign labelled non-branded.
Pull your converting search terms.
90 days.
Dump them in a sheet.
Then add one column and label it branded or non-branded, and go line by line.
Your brand name, your brand name misspelled, your brand plus a product word.
Your competitor's brand, which is not branded for you, that one's earned.
Then pull your targeted ASINs and do the same thing.
Yours versus everybody else's.
It takes an hour, maybe two if your catalog is big.
Most sellers don't want to do it.
Do it anyway.
Then sum the spend by that column and look at what you actually have.
In the accounts I've opened, the split is usually a long way off what the campaign names said it was.
I've had accounts where the "non-branded" bucket was carrying half its spend on branded keywords and branded ASIN defense, and the seller had been reporting growth off that number for a year.
This matters because the decisions downstream depend on it.
What you can scale, what your real ACoS on new demand looks like, whether that scale test last quarter measured anything.
Honestly, I don't know how you set a target on a bucket you haven't verified.
So do the classifying first.
So what does your split actually look like when you count the terms instead of the campaign names?