An account came to us spending over $40,000 on branded terms alone. Their agency
By Elizabeth Greene · October 16, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
An account came to us spending over $40,000 on branded terms alone.
Their agency was telling them the way to grow was to spend more.
They didn't want to go higher, and they couldn't grow.
So we pulled the search terms report and looked at the terms that were actually getting clicks.
Their brand name, over and over.
People typing the brand they already knew.
In practice, that spend broke into a few pieces:
→ Their own brand name, bid up, converting great
→ Their brand name plus a product word, also converting great
→ Their brand name plus a competitor's product they don't even sell
→ Product targeting on their own catalog, sitting in the same campaigns as everything else
In the report those all look like a win, low ACoS and good ROAS, so nobody in that account had flagged any of it.
What we changed: branded terms got their own campaigns. Then branded got its own optimization target and its own rule set. More conservative.
Never scaling on it.
Those campaigns just make you pay for the market share you already have.
Branded spend went from $40,000 to under $14,000.
The rest moved into non-branded and a real ranking structure.
Total ACoS is still under 12%.
And they've been growing 30% year over year for three months.
What's your branded spend sitting at right now?