The RIGHT Way to Set Up Brand Search Campaigns in Google Ads

In this video, I'm going to show you the right way to build a brand search campaign. There's actually two ways of doing it. I'm going to show you both. Let's dive in. Okay, let's start with what is a brand campaign? So simply, a brand campaign is going to be your brand terms. So if you are Nike and this is your account, Nike terms are going to be brand terms to you. If you're Best Buy, Best Buy terms are going to be brand terms to you. If you're bob computer parts.com Bob's computer parts is going to be your brand term. So usually brand terms are going to be people who are searching for you, who are already aware of you. Now, it doesn't mean that it's all repeat or return customers, right? It could be they saw a Facebook ad, they saw a YouTube video, an influencer mentioned you in one of their videos, and you're simply now searching that brand name. Or you're golfing with your buddies and someone mentions a brand or a specific golf club that you've never heard of, you're searching for that. So at some point in the person's journey, they've heard of you, right, through some form of other marketing or word of mouth. Then they search you. They're looking specifically for you. That is brand terms. Those are going to be the brand ads you're showing. Now this becomes a debatable topic in regards to like, should I even run a brand campaign? I don't really fully want to go into that. There's a whole video in itself which I've never actually done because I think it's just, I don't know, it's kind of an annoying topic to me. But here's, here's how I look at it. If you have zero competitors who bid on your name, which is very rare these days, but it does happen. It's rare because of a lot of performance Max will. You don't have the control. So performance max will start targeting some of that. But if you don't have any competitors bid on your brand name, don't run ads. It's that simple. Now if there are competitors bidding on your brand names, I suggest running a brand campaign. That way you capture the monopoly spot of that top ad spot. Okay, now how do you set up a brand campaign? Because it's going to be a bit different than how you're going to set up a non brand campaign. The goal is completely different. Non brand. Generally you're looking at how do I hit a goal of new Customer acquisition there. Whether it's you know, ROAS or CPA or in CAC or mer. If you're going even more advanced for brand, it's different. Your goal really is impression share, right. And capturing that monopoly spot of that top ad spot. So the way you build the brand campaign is going to be different from non brand. So you know I have a video out there or probably multiple videos at this point. In regards to like setting up Google search ad campaigns for brand, it's just going to be the settings that you want to set up. The bidding, et cetera are going to be a bit unique. So I'm going to set one up live here. I'm inside of an account. We're going to hit create campaign, new campaign campaign. Choose your objective. If you've seen any of my videos I always say you do not need to actually click one of these. All these do is decrease the amount of settings. So if you want sales it's going to give you like sales settings. Leads will give you lead settings in the campaign. You're following my expert advice. So we don't need goal guidance. You've got my guidance in this video. So we're going to hit create a campaign without goals guidance. Then we're going to hit search campaign because that's what we're building. You're going to want your conversion goal set up for this account. This is going to be an E commerce business. So it's purchases. That's exactly what I want. So we are all good there. So I'm going to hit continue. Then this thing pops up. You can ignore that. Then we're going to name it. I'm going to do a lot of times it's brand. It's like as simple as that. And then I'm just going to put new mainly because. So start new because in this account I actually already have a brand campaign then bidding. So this is actually something we will come back to. For now I'm just going to leave it as maximize conversions. We will come back to bidding. So hold tight there. Then this customer acquisition piece here. Optimize campaign. It's just ignore this for your brand campaign. Hit hit next. All right, so you've got. They're going to try to push you into search partner network or display network. We do not want display network for brand. It's your terms. Right. So there are times I, I will start with search partner network. A lot of times though start with I. Here's what I recommend. Start with search partners off. Then once the campaign's running for a week or 30 days. And you, you're confident in what you're seeing in the data there. Like it is your brand terms that are showing and everything looks good. Then you flick that on, test it for 30 days, and then you see does search partners help or not? A lot of times it's your brand term. So even putting search partners on is fine. But don't start with it then. Location is simple. We're just United States. I always have the presence setting checked. You do not want presence or interest. These could be people outside of the United States. So I don't want Google doing that. I want people in the United States. So this setting is important. English is fine. Audience segments, I don't need to worry about too much right now. So we're just going to leave it as is and then. All right, Google wants to push you into this broad match keywords. We do not want this on right now. There is two ways of kind of setting brand campaigns up. So I'm going to show you this, this specific way and then I'll show the other way. But for now, I'm going to hit off automatically created assets. We do not want this. This is allowing Google to actually create content for you. So I'm going to have that off. And if you want to, while you're in this process, learn more about it, you can. But for now, again, just ignore all of that, all of these more settings. This is all fine. Unless you want to change, like for whatever reason, ad schedule or something like that, or you have URL tracking parameters. Ignore that. Then there's brands. I'm going to get to this, okay, in the second way of setting this up. But this is basically adding your brand. But you see how it says requires broad match keywords to be turned on. So this is the second way of building brand campaigns. So we're going to ignore this and not have this on for now. Then I'm going to hit next. Then it's going to want to do keyword generation. I'm going to hit skip. And then we're going to go now into the ad group. This is very simple to start. So my brand term is home reserve. And the website's homereserve.com right. So how, how do I approach this? In the beginning? Here's. It's literally super simple. Home reserve. And then I'll phrase match. So home reserve, that's exact match with the brackets and then home reserve phrase. Now I don't need to go beyond that. Right now the phrase match is going to capture a lot of my other brand traffic. And exact is exact. So that's someone exactly searching home reserve. By the way, the way keyword match types work, it's going to pick up, you know, other variations. So if they don't space it or if they put home reserve.com or something in Google search, so this will do a good job of capturing most of that phrase then opens it up for long tail. That could be people searching like home reserve sectionals home reserve free swatches. Right. As I start getting that search queries data then I'll start adding that or adding those keywords if I want to add those. But literally for now I just, my company is home reserve. I have home reserve exact home reserve phrase. Now where you have to be super careful is if you have generic brand terms. Right? So if my brand name is, you know, computer parts plus, you've got to be very, very careful there. You're going to get a bunch of irrelevant traffic and that's where the second setup comes into play. This is what I'll tell you. Now if you are a computer parts plus, let's say and I'm obviously that's an example like generic. But if you have just like a generic brand name that can fire for a bunch of non brand traffic, then what I simply do for those companies, let's say it's computer parts plus.com I literally add computer parts and then what you can do, you don't, it won't accept a period. So what you have to do is space. Com and I do that in exact match. So it's computer parts. I think I said plus. But we'll just say let's say you're a computer parts dot com. Right? I am just for those generic terms doing computer parts space. Com because that is the exact brand search for them because that's their website, right. If you just did computer parts like that or technically that good luck, you're going to burn money. I get you sell computer parts and I get your name is computer parts.com. this is going to be a huge amount of non brand traffic. So you're, you're your campaign. You know you could bleed a lot of money in generic brand term campaigns. So you have to be very, very cautious there. So just know generic name, start with brand name with the comm at the end. All right. So for home reserve I don't have to worry about that. I've got exact, I've got phrase. We're good to go. Google's going to try to push you into you know, broad match and adding more keywords, yada yada, just ignore all that and then I'm gonna skip ad creation. I've got, you know, tons of videos on ad creation and everything. So that's on the channel or in my Google Ads course, which the description, I, I've got a link to that in the description below if you wanna go check that out. So we're not gonna talk about ad creation right now. Okay. Now it's just budget. Google will recommend a budget to you. I'm just gonna set this to $100 a day to get. And then we're going to publish this. Okay. Okay. The campaign is set up some important things now. Number one, I have some negative keywords that I want added to this. Right. I have a full video on negative keywords or it's in my Google Ads course as well. If you want to learn more step by step on negative keyword research how to find negative keywords. But for brand, okay, just because it is your brand term, you would think I don't really need to add negative keywords. That is incorrect. What you need to do is go into your negative keywords search. So you go to down to audience keywords and content search keywords. You go over to negative search keywords right here. You're going to want to probably create some brand specific negative keywords. And what do I mean by that? A lot of brands will have these issues. Log in. All right, so these are customers. Maybe you have a login portal. Probably not worth firing an ad for someone typing your brand plus login. So if someone's typing in home reserve login, I don't like there are, they're a customer, they're just trying to log into their account. So I don't really want to fire ads in that case. Sometimes customer service could be one. So it's home reserve customer service. Or if you've got a lot of money and you just want to have a better user experience, this term would be its own unique ad group. And then your ad copy would be unique to serving someone because this is going to be someone who's got an issue. Right? And so now your ad copy is very unique to a customer service term. This is not a buyer term. This is not converting new customer acquisition at all. This would be more user experience. So a lot of people like, hey, let's get rid of customer service, let's get rid of phone or phone number, right? People who are looking, this is going to relate to customer service. A lot of times, you know, shipping Coupons sometimes. Now, if you're running coupons, that's a whole different ad group that you could create. Or you've got a ad group for home reserve, like promo codes. We don't run any of that. So I don't have that or coupon codes. I would have an ad group for these keywords specifically. And guess what my ad's going to say? It's going to say here's my, here's our sale that we're running this month or this week or whatever. So I'm going to try to capture that within that ad and not have like the coupon code. Websites get that traffic. So now I'm not running that. But you could, if you don't want the coupon codes or promo codes, you could add those as negative keywords. Jobs is another one. Careers, internships, et cetera. Think of everything that your customer or someone who interacts with your brand that's not technically a new customer might be searching. And eventually you're going to find this in the search query data as you launch a brand campaign. But get ahead of it now and think, is it logins, is it customer service, phone number, shipping, jobs, careers, internships, et cetera. Add those as negative keywords so you don't fire your brand ads on those. Okay, so here you would just simply hit save. Or what you can do is create a negative keyword list out of that. And this would just be, you know, brand campaign negatives, you name it, whatever you want. So now I'm just going to hit boom, save. Okay. Okay. Now second biggest thing, this is going to be your bid strategy. And for this, it's set to maximize conversions. Now, bidding for brand campaign gets very tricky. If you are the generic brand computer parts.com you will not be able to bid how I'm about to tell you, if you're home reserved, you will be able to bid how I'm about to tell you. And I have a full masterclass on bidding. If you want to go through that, that video will be in the description below. But brand terms, your these are people who are already aware of you. They're searching for you again. So for brand terms, you don't have to operate with smart bidding. In fact, many times I see when I implement smart bidding, T row as bid strategy, maximize conversions, maximize conversion value. I see inflated CPCS for a diminishing return. So what I actually do in most cases for my brand campaigns is manually bid it. And so in your bidding I just go down to select a bidding strategy directly. I Go to manual cpc. Google does not like it so they're going to try to get you to not implement that and then I'm going to hit save then. Now I've got manual CPC bidding set up and now I can control the bids of my brand terms. Right. When you operate with smart bidding in a brand campaign, you're allowing Google to basically try to go get conversions, right? Well again these, for the most part it's a brand campaign. It's going to usually mint money at a high roas as long as you don't have a super generic brand name like I computer parts.com so I don't need to worry about letting the algorithm of Google figure out that that's what is good. The, the, the smart bidding algorithm is good for non brand campaigns. It is not good in my opinion in most cases for brand campaigns. Now there's probably people in the comment section who are going to want to debate me on that. Here's my answer to that. It's test because some of them are going to be like, well actually I do really well with troas, but fine, run troas. So I'm just saying I start with manual cpc. I've got a lot of historical accounts where I've tested every bid strategy and I'm still a manual CPC for my brand campaigns. I control the diminishing return that Google's smart bidding really wants to push. A lot of times I see my average CPC increase with no increase at the same percent of conversions. So I can control that a lot of times by the manual CPC. I did a video on brand restrictions costing me 30% more. And this is what I'm going to talk about next on the second stage of how to set up a brand campaign, second way of doing it. But with brand campaigns, if you go into Google's algorithm, sometimes with the smart bidding or the smart features they have, including this brand restrictions setting that I'm going to show you here in a bit. It cost me actually 30% more. I got 30% more in my average CPC without any really additional increase in the traffic or conversions. Right. So I always start brand campaigns on manual CPC bidding. A few other tests that you can do would be after running it for a while you can test a smart bidding strategy. But make sure you look at before and after. Did you actually get any lift from that or did you just see an inflated average CPC by the way? A lot of times that's what I see. So then I revert back to manual or target impression share bid strategy. A lot of times I'll test that. So with the target impression share bid strategy, all you're doing there is you're telling Google I want to be in a lot. I'll do absolute tops of result page and it asks you how much a hundred percent of the time. It's going to ask you for a maximum CPC bid limit. If I've been running manual CPC bidding in my brand account, I'm kind I'm going to know what my brand terms are kind of costing to get, you know, high impression share. So I'll look at what I'm currently getting from manual CPC and I may increase it by 10%. So let's say I'm paying on average a dollar per click and I have high impression share on my brand terms already. I'll do a $10 cap. I might run this and I have 10, I have accounts where I'm running this currently. It's easy. I don't have to worry about manual CPC bids anymore. It's and I'm basically telling Google I want to be absolute top which is basically ad number one and I want 100% of that. Now you don't always get a hundred percent. But this is what I'm telling Google. This is an aggressive strategy, but it's with brand and I'm also capping it then so I'm controlling my costs there. So with that you can do the target impression share but again start with manual CPC bid, get a feel for those bids, get a feel for your impression share on that. Then you can test different bid strategies. Okay. Second way of doing a brand campaign, this can work for those generic terms that I discussed. So if you're computerparts.com this can work. If you don't have generic terms like home reserve doesn't have really a generic brand name. Right. Then I don't normally do this because I do see inflated costs. Again, I have a video there where I had a 30% increase on this. There's something that you can do where you're creating and using a brand inclusion. Okay, so what does a brand inclusion mean? Your ads will only show on searches that match your keywords and mention selected brands, including related products and services. So this is Google has an index of your brand. So if you're nike.com, google's going to have an index of your brand. Google knows Nike. Google's possibly hasn't indexed you. And if that's not, or if that is the case, you have to send in your brand terms to them and it can Be a bit of a process. I'll show you that a little bit. But this is basically saying hey Google, I'm this brand. Only show me terms related to this brand. It does a pretty good job. Sometimes it puts in some terms there that are irrelevant. You could still have to be cautious there and add some negative keywords. But this is really good for the computerparts.com type of people or type of brands that are very generic in their names and it's very hard then to control with just normal keyword targeting and bidding. So you'll notice I can't add a brand inclusion here because it wants me to switch my bid strategy to a value based bidding strategy and it wants me to use broad terms. So I have to go back up to broad match keywords. I have to now turn this on but actually it won't let me do that because I'm on a manual CPC bidding. So now I have to come back to my bid strategy. I now have to go to maximize conversion value. This is E commerce without going too in depth on bidding and again I have a full video on that and I or in my course max conversions is usually good for or conversion based is usually good for lead generation conversion value based bidding is usually good for E commerce simply just for simple sake. Right now look at it that way. It goes a little more advanced than that in many accounts but for now just look at it like that. So I'm going to do maximize conversion value. Then I'm going to come down to my broad match keywords. I'm going to flick this on. So I'm going to hit save. So now this is turning on. What's going to happen is remember I added the as exact and phrase match. It's going to change home reserve to broad match now and I'll show you that here in a bit once it loads. Now I come down to this brand inclusion and I already have my brand terms in here. So Google already has me indexed. So I just click that and then I hit save. Okay, now what happens again? If you don't have a brand you're going to have to hit this new brand list and then let's say Bob's computer parts. Google's probably like we don't know what this brand is. You literally just hit request a brand. You go through this form fill and then Google will eventually index that. I forget how long it takes. It's not overnight so it will take a bit of time. Home reserve, they've already indexed us. I already have the brand inclusion. So I'm going to hit save now. If we go back into the campaign it's going to be on broad. Look at that. It's changed my keyword so it's no longer exact in phrase it's broad match. But I've applied that brand inclusion list to it. So Google knows only show our ads for searches that are for home reserve brand and Google has the indexed of our brand terms based off of all the data that they have on us as a website and as an advertiser. What I recommend if you use this a you must review the search queries report. You've got to understand and and you simply do that by you go to search query or sorry you go to insights and reports you go to search terms. This is going to show you what searches are firing for your ads. Google can still sneak in irrelevant traffic there even when it's like wait a second I I'm using my brand list and you said you know my brand terms. How are you, how are you showing me for non brand stuff? It will do it. So don't always trust Google. So make sure you check the search terms. Then I you notice I started with maximize conversion value brand A lot of time is going to operate at a high like a high roas. So here maybe start the first day or two if you're going to be using this strategy on a maximized conversion value. Once you start getting a bit of data there run a pretty high roas to have the efficiency there high roas for brand it's not unusual to see brand campaigns hit like a thousand percent returns and so again run maximize conversion value first to get a baseline of what like Google's running. This is only if you're doing the brand inclusion setup. If you're doing my second setup ignore this advice in the second setup is a manual setup, right? But the brand inclusion with this, with this broad keyword start with maximized conversion value, get a baseline and then flick to troas bid strategy there after running for about a week and so if you ran for a week and let's say you're operating at 800% ROAS I would come in here and just go a bit higher than what it's baselined at. So maybe go to 900. I'm pushing Google for efficiency. These are my brand terms now over time I would monitor what's the data showing, what's my impression share showing am I getting high impression share at this high roas goal or do I need to start adjusting my bidding there but just get a baseline for a week at maximize conversion value if you're E commerce, maximize conversion if you're lead gen then flick over to T roas if you're E commerce at the baseline that it that it's been for the last week. Or if you're legion, you would go to Target cpa. Again, if you want to get into the nuances of bidding, I've got a course or a full video on bidding and that video is in the description below. There you go. You now know how to build a brand search campaign the right way. If this is the first time you've been on Grow My Ads channel, welcome. We've got a lot of great content. There's probably a few videos floating on my screen screen right now. Make sure to go check out some of our other content. You'll get tremendous value, I promise. If not, no worries. I'll see you in the next video.