Should You Run Brand Ads? The Truth About Brand Campaigns

One of the most debated topics in Google Ads world is should you or should you not run brand ads? In today's video I'm going to show you a case with a company that I said go turn your brand ads off. And they were like what do you mean turn them off? Look at the row as we're getting. None of that matters. I said let's take a look at the back end numbers. We're going to see do you get a decrease new customers, you get a decrease in sales? I'm going to prove to you you're not because I have the data that determines that you don't need to run brand ads. So I am not saying by the way, in this video every company should go turn brand ads off. I will show you what you should look at to determine whether or not you would do a test like I'm going to show you that ended up saving this company probably five to $10,000 a year in brand ad costs that they shouldn't be spending and feeding that to big greedy Google and saving themselves that money that's back in their bank account. For those of that don't know me, my name is Austin Claire. I own an agency called Grow my Ads where we manage millions and millions of Google Ad spend per year. Let's dive in. Okay, I'm inside a real account and I'm in the brand campaign and I want to show you. So August is when we shut brand ads off. This is a seasonal business. They, they go crazy in the spring, early summer and it starts dying off in the fall and winter. You'll they were spending like 4 or 500amonth. In the beginning of the year it was like $1,000 a month but during this time frame is more like 4 to 500. So total spend 900. But again we shut off in August. Now their name is very unique. Okay. And when we would do some searching in incognito, we would never see competitor ads show up. So we're like, all right, hold on, let's look at the Auction Insight data. So if you go into insight and reports when you're in a campaign, you go to Auction Insights. It's going to show you competitors that you're in auctions with. There's absolutely nothing here. And I'll show you an account later where you get this data. By the way, I have a full video on Auction Insight how to read the metrics. So that video, if you want to check out after this video, you can find that in the description below. There'll be a link to that YouTube video. But there's, there was nothing here. And so we went to the client and we're like, hey, we think you just shut brand ads off. This is their search campaign. You have a unique name. We don't see anything when we search incognito. And there's zero data in the auction insight report that indicates that there's competitors bidding on your name. Let's shut it off. So they were like a little leery, right? Because they go down. Look at the roas we get from it and it looks very beautiful in the vanity metrics inside of a Google Ads account, but it means nothing. I think you're just feeding greedy Google more money than you should. So we shut it off. Now we track on the, on the back end. So this isn't something we're just, hey, let's just blindly trust what Austin has to say. No, let's look at true backend data. So remember, we shut off in August. Again, seasonal business. And I, I did take this data from around June through August because this is the, the best way of doing a before and after on this. So in July. Now again, this is weekly data. So some of this like June 30th through July 6th, I'm going to be using this time frame probably through August 3rd. So there'll be a couple days of August in here. But let's look at website revenue. So remember here we're going to have our ads running completely. So that's 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks of data throughout July. A couple of days like first couple days of August are included in here. We did 152,841 in revenue. Now we're completely shut off on brand ads. Remember, let's look at what revenue did then in the next four weeks after doing that. 169,571. Very consistent with what they would feel. Actually August should be probably even a little lower than July. But revenue is very similar compared to when we were running brand ads in July. And these are good two months to compare each other with. Now more importantly, what about new customer acquisition? So if I take that same four week time period, we did 640 new customers that we acquired new. Now the next four weeks we did 684 new customers. So during this time period we lost no revenue and we actually increased a little. And we lost no new customers. We actually increased new customers. So due to this data and we present this to them and saying like I don't think brand ads did anything for you. And here's the proof they were very confident in, like, oh, well, thank you. Now we're gonna save all this money. So in their case, it was simple to shut it off because there was no Auction Insight data showing competitors they had a unique name. We never saw competitors on incognito when we did searching and we proved it with a before and after test on backend data. I want to show you an account though. If you check, that would indicate don't shut brand ads off and you probably should run them. Okay, so I'm in another account. I'm in a brand campaign. As you can see, brand right here. And I'm in the Auction Insight report. Okay, well, look at this. We've got competitors, all right, We've got Amazon and Cozy and Lovesac and Anna Bay. We have competitors here. It would make absolutely no sense then for us to turn brand ads off in this case unless they're okay with competitors taking the top spots. So I'm going to show you if you did an example or a search for like Casper Mattress. So Casper absolutely should be running brand ads, right? I searched Casper Mattress. This is an absolute brand term for them. And look, Nectar Sleeps targeting them. Nectar versus Casper. This is a very good ad they've got. I'm sure there's other ads that fire here too. Yeah, we have Mattress verdict top5mattresses.com. We have shopping ads from other competitors as well. So if, if Casper didn't run brand ads right here, the number one result more than likely would have been Nectar Sleep. With a Nectar versus Casper mattress. Probably not what you want. Right? And in this video I'm trying to prove. I'm not trying to say you should or shouldn't run brand ads. What I'm trying to say is if you see absolutely no data in the Auction Insight report and when you do incognito searches of any competitors bidding on your name, then you probably should test turning it off. I just hate seeing companies spend all that money on brand terms for their own name to Google when they don't need to. Right now in 90% of the cases, if you're in competitive industries, which many are and people are attacking each other's names, you more than likely should have have then some brand protection by running brand campaigns. A Casper Mattress would be a perfect example where they're getting attacked by Nectar Sleep here and Casper wants to maintain their brand protection having this number one spot on their name. It's still a socks that you got to do. But that's the game, thanks to Google. But in this case, I would absolutely recommend Casper keep running brand ads. In the case that I just showed you though, where the data indicates that none of this is taking place, I would say save your money. It's totally insane to give Google any CPC for any click on your brand name when there's no one else bidding on it. And in that case we proved it with back end sales data. So if you were to test whether or not you would want to shut off brand search ads, then a check auction insight data first like I showed you, and B make sure you have a foundation of back end data built that you can review and cross reference and make sure you're not actually hurting yourselves when you do shut it off. Because your Google Ads in app metrics absolutely are going to drop holistic as an aggregate. It's going to drop right? Brand campaigns gone, the revenue from that, the roas from that won't be a part of your aggregate in the account. That doesn't matter. What matters is what's happening on the back end. So you need to have a rapport or a foundation of back end data metrics that you can review, especially when it comes to sales and especially when it comes to new customers that you're generating.