Aaron Young explains why Target ROAS fails for branded search. A European ecommerce brand switched from Target ROAS to Maximize Clicks with a capped CPC bid and cut average cost per click from €1.60 to €0.58 in 30 days, while ROAS improved.
If you're running branded search campaigns, please don't use smart bidding like Target ROAS or Maximize Conversion Value. Right now we're seeing the best results with using Maximize Clicks with a CPC bid limit. If you don't believe me, let me just show you this data through here. So for context, this was an ecommerce brand in Europe, and what we went through is after going through and auditing some of their campaigns, we noticed that they were using Target ROAS on their branded campaigns or their branded search campaigns. So what we did is we switched back to maximize clicks with a maximized CPC bid limit. And you can see the results from here. So they saved over half. So this is looking at a 30-day period. We made the change on the 4th of August. So comparing 4th of August to 30th of September versus the 30 previous days. And their CPC went down from close to €1.60 down to €0.58. But interesting, they actually got more higher ROAS or conversion value cost their spend. Now the reason why this is so important is because you need to remember, obviously fundamentally with branded search, you're just wanting to remove the barriers. You don't need to worry about smart bidding or any of those things. You just want to get the lowest price traffic so that you can reach the intended users. So if you feel like you're paying far too much for your branded traffic, why don't you do a test, move back to maximize clicks with a CPC bid limit.
