Google Ads Brand Campaigns: Vanity Spend or Smart Strategy?

It's one of the most common questions we get from our Shopify brands, and one of the most heavily debated topics in paid search.

Why are we paying for clicks from people who are already looking for us?

It's a fair question. On the surface, brand campaigns look like paying Google for traffic that you've already warmed up - customers who know your name, typed it into a search bar, and are one click away from your site anyhow so surely it’s just a campaign for the vanity metrics?

The reality is more complicated. And getting this decision wrong - in either direction - has a meaningful impact on both your budget and your account's health and ability to scale.

THE CASE AGAINST (AND WHY IT HAS MERIT)

The scepticism around brand search campaigns is really fair. If you have a strong organic search presence and no competitors bidding on your brand terms, pausing brand campaigns will often have minimal impact on revenue. The clicks come through organically instead. You save the budget and numbers look roughly the same.

We've tested this so many times and seen it play out. Brands pause brand campaigns to test the water, organic brand clicks absorb the volume, and the net effect on revenue is negligible. In those situations, continuing to run brand campaigns is genuinely difficult to justify - you're paying for something that would have happened anyway.

It’s not about asking "are brand campaigns driving conversions?" …of course they are, they should be the easiest conversions in your account. The question that is right to ask is regarding incrementality and whether those conversions would have happened without the paid campaign. If the answer is yes, the ROAS looks impressive and means very little.

THE CASE FOR (AND WHY IT’S STRONGER THAN MOST BRANDS REALISE)

Here's where it gets more interesting, and where the ads strategist often has to push back.

Brand keyword conversions are almost always your cheapest in the account. High intent, high familiarity, minimal friction. Someone searching your brand name and clicking your ad is as close to a guaranteed conversion as paid search offers. CPAs on brand campaigns routinely come in at a fraction of what non-brand campaigns deliver.

So what is that data doing inside your account?

The Google Ads smart bidding algorithms are constantly learning, and you want them to build a picture of what a high-value user looks like - which signals, behaviours, and audience characteristics predict a conversion. Every conversion that flows through your account feeds that model.

Brand campaign conversions, coming in at high volume and low cost, are your cleanest signals and they're telling the algorithm: this is what someone who buys looks like. The algorithm then takes that information and uses it to find more people who look similar - across Shopping Search and PMax.

The question stops being "is this brand click worth paying for?" and becomes "is the data this conversion generates worth the cost of acquiring it?" For most accounts with meaningful brand search volume, the answer is yes. You're not just buying a conversion. You're feeding the engine and training it to find your next thousand customers at a nice low CPA.

THE COMPETITIVE DIMENSION

There's another consideration that doesn't appear in the immediate numbers but which should inform the decision - what happens in the auction when you're not there.

In highly competitive verticals (eg.supplements, skincare, fashion, home + garden)  competitors regularly bid on each other's brand terms. If you pause your brand campaign and a direct competitor is bidding on your brand name, they now have an uncontested path to appear above your organic listing when someone searches specifically for you. A customer who typed your brand name into Google can easily end up clicking a competitor's ad before they ever reach your site. If you are finding your competitors in your search terms report, pausing your brand campaign isn't saving budget, it's handing qualified traffic with high purchase intent to your competitors.

HOW TO ACTUALLY MAKE THE DECISION

There isn't a universal answer, and we understand how frustrating that can be to brands who just want a clear yes or no. The right call depends on three things.

Competitive pressure. Are competitors showing up in your search terms? If yes, brand campaigns are almost certainly justified regardless of incrementality concerns. If the results are clean, the decision is more nuanced.

Organic brand click volume. The only way to know is to test by pausing brand campaigns for two to three weeks and monitoring organic brand clicks in Google Search Console alongside revenue. If organic absorbs the volume cleanly, the incrementality argument holds. If you see a gap and there are fewer overall brand clicks, lower brand revenue then paid brand activity was contributing more than it appeared.

Account learning needs. If it’s a relatively new Ad account or if you're in a growth phase, running smart bidding strategies, and your non-brand campaigns need more conversion data to optimise effectively, then brand campaigns are an important part of the data strategy. You're running them not just to capture conversions but to accelerate the algorithm's learning across the whole account. The cost of those brand clicks is an investment in the performance of everything else.

THE MISTAKE IN BOTH DIRECTIONS

Brands that run brand campaigns without questioning them are often padding their ROAS with easy conversions and mistaking that for strong account performance. High brand ROAS looks great in a monthly report. It doesn't tell you whether your account is actually growing.

Brands that dismiss brand campaigns entirely as vanity spend are often ignoring the data value, the competitive exposure, and the downstream impact on smart bidding performance. The decision deserves more analysis than "we shouldn't pay for people who already know us."

Our honest position is that brand campaigns are neither essential nor redundant by default. They're a tool that can either waste budget or compound performance depending on how intelligently it's used.

IN A NUTSHELL…

When we take on a new Google Ads account, analysing the brand campaign necessity is top of the list. We look at competitive pressure in the auction, organic brand click trends, conversion volume, and what the account's smart bidding strategies need to learn effectively.

Sometimes we run brand campaigns aggressively and use them as a deliberate data engine. Sometimes we scale them back significantly. Occasionally we pause them entirely for a test period to establish true incrementality.

There really is no formula, like everything with Ads the only right answer is the one that aligns with your account, growth stage and goals specifically. 

If you're not sure which camp you fall into, or if your brand campaigns have never been properly interrogated, then that's exactly the kind of question our audit process is built to answer.