Google Ads Brand Restrictions Cost Me 30% More!!! (How You Can Avoid It)

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads and in today's video I'm going to talk to you about brand restrictions. It's Google's new feature that allows you to add a brand list so your ads only show for your branded keywords. Sounds great. However, Google snuck in a few settings that you have to enable in order to even use this brand list feature. I've tested this and it increased my average CPC by 30% with 0% gain in conversion value and a decrease in my return on ad spend. So I'm going to break down exactly my test and the settings that I think you should avoid when looking at brand restrictions. So let's dive in. All right, I have Google support page pulled up and I will have the link to this in the description if you want to go check out. This is about, you know the brand restrictions for searchcam campaigns. They give you some information up here. This was launched at the recent Google Marketing Live event that they had. The piece that I was curious about was here. Brand restrictions will restrict your broad match traffic to only serve on searches that include the brands you select. They give you some example. They're claiming if you have historically used exact or phrase match to adhere to specific brand needs, you can now use brand restrictions with broad match for additional reach and performance while still maintaining those brand needs. Okay, sounds. Sounds great. So let's check out a campaign that I do not have this attitude. So if you come down into the settings and then if you come down to this feature now, brand restrictions, you will see I actually cannot add a brand list. Well, here's a little notification. To use brand restrictions, switch to a conversion or conversion value based bidding strategy. In this specific campaign we are using a target impression bid strategy, not a conversion based bid strategy. So I can't even apply a brand list. So let's go to an account where I actually tested this on the brand campaign. I'm going to blur all their information out just to, you know, kind of protect the brand here. So in here again, this is going to be blurred. I just want to show you though that I do have this brand list added and you don't see the notification there. That goes away once you add it. However, here's what happens. You add the brand list and by the way, I had to switch this and this is going to be huge. I had to switch this campaign from a target impression share to a max conversion bid strategy. I had to. I couldn't add the list to even test without doing that. So let me give you a little background this brand campaign, we've been managing it for years. It's completely dialed in. The goal for the client is be number one always. That's it. They don't have any advanced strategic sort of plans for their, for their brand terms. They're just like listen, we want to be number one. They do have competitors that will bid on their brand name and their ads will show and they always hate it if they see a competitor ad above their ad. By the way, I have a video on exactly what to do in that situation. I will add that to the description below. Make sure to go check that out after watching this complete video. So going back to the the bid strategy here, I went from target impression share because we just wanted to be absolutely number one always and it's impossible to really get that to 100. I mean I've seen it in certain cases but the, this is a very competitive industry. So they're high 90s for the most part at the absolute top impression share which you know equates to being number one. And we've had their keywords very much dialed in. If you look at the search term report for their brand terms you don't see a lot of irrelevant traffic. It's, it's all searches for their further brand keywords which is exactly what you want on a brand campaign. There are cases, right? And this is where I thought brand restriction list made sense and I was happy to see Google make a feature like this until testing it where your brand name may be generic and fire a lot of non brand keywords or a lot of non brand searches. So we've seen that in audits, we've seen that with past clients where you do the search query report term sort of analysis and you're like whoa, whoa, whoa, you guys, you know you're showing for a ton of terms that are irrelevant are not actually even your brand name. And that could be because there's movies that are named or titled close to what their brand term is or video games I've seen or even just certain cases where other businesses share a very similar name to their. So you know, you may be a plumbing company but there's also a pest control company in the same city you are and your guys names are close and there's this mismatch. So you don't want pest control terms showing for your brand campaign if you're the plumber. So to give you an example and that's where this brand restriction list applies. Make made sense to me. Hey, it can kind of filter all of that out to make sure your brand terms are the only thing that are showing again. Google sneaks in some settings here though usually to favor Google, which usually means costing you more money and making Google more money. So I had to switch over to max conversions and then what happens was broad match keyword setting. You see this here it is. Now flicked on. This campaign only had exact and phrase match keywords added to it for their brand terms. We weren't using a broad term at all. We didn't really need to to test this. You had to change all of your keywords to broad match. It doesn't just add a broad match keyword of your of your brand term and allow the exact and phrase still to serve. No, it takes the exact and phrase match keywords you have and it literally changes them to broad match. So I went with it, I tested it and let's look what happened. So I'm gonna go into the ad group again. Everything the names are gonna be all blurred out, but I'll give you the data here. So I'm only you know, a little over two weeks in a test here, but it's enough for me to already determine I do not like this and I' going to be switching back. So here's what happened. My average CPC has increased by 30%. Okay, well if I got a 30% gain then on my my conversions, maybe I'm okay with that. Well, that's not what happened. Conversions are only up 4% compared to the the previous period. That might as well be zero. 4% is such a small number in, in this case where it could be one good day versus one bad day. So I, I might have had just one natural better day within this time period that I'm testing compared to the previous days of the same time frame. So that to me is just that means nothing. That does not mean brand restriction list being applied to this campaign equates to 4% increase in conversion. No, to me it means 0% change there. So what I am seeing is now a return on ad spend decrease my conclusion from this so far. Now I could allow this to run further and maybe I should, but I, I, I'm already seeing what's going on here. My conclusion right now is adding the brand restriction list, changing the keywords to broad match, changing the bid strategy, the max conversions because I had to in order to even test this for the brand restriction equates to an increase in my average CPC and no increase in actual performance on the conversions and purchases. So be very, very cautious when looking at applying brand restrictions I would really only be testing this now if you have a terrible issue with your brand terms firing for a lot of irrelevant traffic due to some of those scenarios I talked about just a little bit ago at our team here at Grow My Ads we we are avoiding using this right now. We may test it on a few smaller accounts and if I find additional sort of findings from that test then I will make sure to update everyone on YouTube and I will make sure to update even in the description of this video because I only want you know, fair test being shown out there because a lot of you are looking at this on ways of how do I go about some of these new features or changes to my account. My recommendation to our clients and my recommendation to our team is hold off on brand restriction right now. You can as a good analyst managing an account you can have a very fine tuned brand campaign using exact and phrase match using bid strategies that don't have to be maximized conversion. I don't have an issue with maximize conversion on brand by the way but they force you into it and I don't think you have to use all broad match keywords either for your brand campaigns. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So we are going to be avoiding this ourselves for most of our clients. Again we'll be doing some smaller tests. I'm seeing nothing more here than an increase on Google's revenue. They cost me 30% more click for 0% gain in this case. I hope you find that helpful. I hope I saved some of you some money and I hope to find you guys watching my next videos. Thanks.