I’ve onboarded about 4 or 5 clients since joining Nectar and one thing keeps com
By Katiemichowski · November 14, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I’ve onboarded about 4 or 5 clients since joining Nectar and one thing keeps coming up in the account audits and when I really dive deep through the data myself: how often branded negatives are missing from the ads strategy.
Auto campaigns running as a “catch all” and picking up branded searches and no negatives. Category/Non-Brand phrase match campaigns doing the same. No branded exact or phrase negatives to keep that traffic separate. Seeing clients spend over 50% of their budgets to branded terms.
Sure, the ROAS looks good. But how much of that performance is coming from shoppers who were already searching for your brand? Or had 100% intent to purchase your brand? Then you look at the brand’s Search Query Performance (SQP) data, and impression share or purchase share on the category terms you’re trying to grow hasn’t really moved.
That’s where I think we need to ask more questions.
At Nectar, and how I like to approach it, we use branded negatives to help separate branded demand from category and competitor performance. We also use SQP data to guide the strategy and check whether the results we’re seeing in the ad account line up with gains in impression share and purchase share on the searches that matter.
SQP doesn’t prove ads caused that growth, but it gives us more context than ROAS alone. I want to be able to tell a client where we’re gaining ground and where we still have work to do. A good ROAS is only part of that conversation.