I’ll share why in a moment (and what you can do to fix it), but first: what are “Branded” vs “Non-Branded” campaigns?

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Non-Branded campaigns exclude certain brand lists and brand-related keywords that people are searching for. (E.g. “I want a pair of jeans”.) For this reason, non-branded campaigns consist almost entirely of cold traffic – people who’ve never heard of your brand.

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Branded campaigns, on the other hand, target people who know your brand or are searching specifically for your product. (E.g. “I want a pair of Levi’s jeans”.) Naturally then, Branded campaigns are made up of almost entirely warm traffic.

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Here’s why it’s important to know the difference between the two: each campaign targets someone at a different stage of the buying journey. Here’s an example from one of our clients in the fashion space…

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Originally, their campaigns were bidding almost exclusively on Branded keywords and while this would lead to sales, there was a key problem: they were cutting off 80-90% of their available market.

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Why? Because they were only targeting leads who were searching for their own brand’s products. In other words they were only targeting warm traffic.

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As a result, their ads were only being shown to a small portion of their Total Addressable Market (TAM), and throttling the growth potential of their campaigns.

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After noticing this, the Public Nectar team began adding Non-Branded campaigns into the mix, and re-adjusted their budget allocation to ensure both groups of buyers were being targeted effectively.

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Whereas before they were only targeting warm traffic, now the traffic coming in was nearly entirely cold.

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As the traffic hit various touch points on their buying journey – and transitioned from cold traffic to warm traffic – leads would enter into a separate campaign designed specifically towards goals like encouraging repeat purchases and referring friends.

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Altogether, this allowed our client to start acquiring genuine new customers which would go on to create significant Lifetime Value (LTV) for the brand, paving the way for profitable scale in the months to come.

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The Non-Branded terms are much more generic compared to the Branded ones – and importantly – the fact that the brand name is absent from Non-Branded campaigns.

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I often see brands getting tricked by their marketing agencies on how much money they’re making from their Google campaigns for this very reason.

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Here’s how that usually happens:

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• Agency XYZ promises to increase their client’s advertising ROAS…
• Agency XYZ goes for the “easy” (read: lazy) option of simply upping the budget for Branded traffic…
• ROAS goes up…but business growth stays the same because they’re not acquiring new customers, only selling to existing ones.

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Is only selling to existing customers bad? In the short-term, no. It can help you create injections of revenue for your brand, and increase the average Lifetime Value of your customers.

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But there’s always a ceiling to the Lifetime Value that you can extract from any given customer. Which means that in the long-term, if your brand isn’t tapping into the blue ocean of acquiring new customers, your growth is likely to become stagnant.

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The fact is, any brand that has serious goals of getting to 7-figures and beyond needs to have both: a strategy for acquiring new customers, and a strategy for turning those new customers into repeat buyers. And since new customers can almost only be reached on Google through Non-Branded traffic, it’s almost impossible to efficiently scale if you’re only relying on Branded campaigns.

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(And if any agency tries to convince you otherwise, run in the opposite direction).

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Anyway…rant aside 😅

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After splitting up the Branded campaigns from the Non-Branded, along with allocating ad budgets respectively, here’s the difference we saw comparing their results from the previous year’s Q2, with their latest Q2 working with Public Nectar:

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Q2 2023

£19.2K Spend

£98.3K Revenue

5.28x Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)

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Q2 2024

£37.7K  Spend (Up 196.4%)

£221.1K  Revenue (Up 225.9%)

5.87x  Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) (Up 10%)

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Keep in mind: this wasn’t a huge change to their strategy…

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This was simply the result of widening the net they were using.

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And with more than double their historical Q2 revenue generated off the back of this one change, the results speak for themselves.

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Want to acquire new customers who’ve never heard of your brand? Use Non-Branded campaigns.

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Want to convert existing website visitors who’ve shown interest in your products? Use Branded campaigns.

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And if you want to build a Google Ads strategy capable of adding 7-figures to your bottom line? Use both.