by Austin LeClear
on January 9, 2026
One of the most hotly debated topics in the Google Ads world is whether you should run Brand ads. At Grow My Ads, we’ve seen other agencies push Google Ads Brand campaigns as a no-brainer, and we’ve watched companies pour thousands into Brand bidding without questioning whether it actually moves the needle. The truth is that it depends — and in this post, we’ll show you exactly how to figure out if your Brand campaigns are worth keeping or if you’re just feeding money to Google Ads for no reason.
Prefer video? Check out Should You Run Brand Ads? The Truth About Brand Campaigns on YouTube:
Still with us? Good, let’s dive in.
Recently, we worked with a company and told them straight up: turn your Brand ads off. Their ROAS (return on ad spend) was great, but vanity metrics like ROAS don’t always tell the whole story. We looked at the backend numbers, tracked their new customers and actual sales, and proved that their Brand campaign was doing nothing but wasting ad spend.
How We Saved Our Client $5,000-$10,000 a Year: A Case Study
This company was spending around $400-500 a month bidding on their own brand name during their off-season, with spikes up to $1,000 a month during their busy spring and summer months. It’s a seasonal business, so we had good data to compare before and after shutting things down. Their brand name was unique — really unique — and when we did some incognito searches on Google, we never saw competitor ads showing up. That was the first red flag.
The second thing we checked was the auction insights report. If you’re running a Google Ads campaign and you go into Insights and Reports, you can pull up auction insights to see which competitors you’re actually competing against in the search results.
For this company? There was absolutely nothing. Zero competitors bidding on their brand name.
To recap:
- Our client had a unique brand name
- We didn’t see any competitor ads when we searched Google on incognito mode
- The auction insights report did not show any competitors bidding on their brand name or branded terms
So we recommended shutting off their Google Ads Brand campaign.
They were nervous. Anyone would be. Looking at the beautiful ROAS numbers in Google Ads makes it feel like you’re crushing it. But those metrics can be misleading when you’re dealing with branded terms — users searching for your brand name were already coming to your website anyway.
What Happened When We Turned Brand Ads Off
We shut off the Brand campaign in August. Here’s what the backend data showed:
In July, with Brand keywords running completely, they did $152,841 in website revenue over a four-week period. In the four weeks after shutting Brand ads off? They did $169,571. Revenue actually went up slightly — and remember, August is typically a slower month for this seasonal business.
But the more important metric was new customer acquisition. During those four weeks in July with Brand ads running, they acquired 642 new customers.
In the four weeks after turning off the Brand campaign? 684 new customers. More new customers, not fewer.
The proof was right there. They lost no revenue. They actually gained new customers. The Google Ads Brand campaign wasn’t driving any incremental value — it was just taking credit for people who were already searching for the company by name and would have found them through organic listings anyway.
When Brand Bidding Actually Makes Sense
Now, we’re not saying every company should shut off their Brand ads. In probably 90% of cases, if you’re in competitive industries where people are attacking each other’s brand names, you should absolutely have brand bidding in place. The key is knowing whether your situation actually calls for it.
Here’s an example of what the opposite scenario looks like:
In this account, we’re running a Brand campaign and the auction insights tell a completely different story. We’re competing with Amazon, Lovesac, Cozey, and more. When there are other brands actively bidding on your brand keywords, turning off your brand campaign would mean giving those top search results spots away to your competitors.
Take Casper mattress as an example. If you search “Casper mattress” on Google, you’ll see Nectar Sleep running ads with ad copy like “Nectar versus Casper.”
You’ll see shopping ads from other mattress brands. You’ll see comparison sites trying to capture that high intent traffic. If Casper didn’t run Brand ads for its own brand name, the number one result would probably be a competitor campaign actively trying to steal their potential customers.
That’s a situation where Brand bidding makes total sense. Casper wants to maintain their brand protection and keep that top spot when users search for their brand name.
Which Approach is Best for Your Company?
Before you make any decisions about your Google Ads Brand campaigns, here’s what you need to check:
- First, look at your auction insights data. Pull up your Brand campaign and check whether competitors are actually showing up when people search for your own brand name. If the report is empty, that’s a strong signal that maybe nobody’s competing for those branded searches.
- Second, do some incognito searches yourself. Open an incognito window and search for your company name, your brand name, and variations of your branded terms. Are competitors showing up in the search results? Are there paid ads from other brands trying to capture people searching for your brand keywords? If not, you might be safe to test turning things off.
- Third — and this is critical — make sure you have backend data tracking in place before you run any test. You need to be able to measure real results: actual sales, actual new customers, actual revenue. Don’t just blindly trust what your Google Ads dashboard says. Your in-app metrics will drop when you shut off a Brand campaign because that revenue and ROAS won’t be part of your aggregate anymore. What matters is what’s actually happening with your business.
Final Thoughts
Bidding on brand keywords in Google Ads isn’t automatically right or wrong. It depends entirely on your specific situation. If you have a unique brand name and nobody’s competing for those branded terms, you might be wasting thousands of dollars a year on clicks you would have gotten anyway through organic results and direct traffic.
But if you’re in a competitive industry where competitors start bidding on your brand keywords and targeting people searching for your brand, then brand protection through bidding on your own brand keywords is probably a smart investment in your overall Google Ads strategy.
So before you assume your Brand campaigns are working just because the ROAS looks good in your Google Ads account, do the homework and investigate. Check auction insights. Search incognito. Track your backend conversion data and key metrics. Then make an informed decision about whether brand bidding actually makes sense for your business — or whether you’re just paying Google to show up for searches where you’d already be the number one organic ranking anyway.
Don’t let vanity metrics in your Google Ads account convince you to keep spending money you don’t need to spend. Test it, measure success with real data, and let the numbers guide your brand bidding strategy.
