We wanted to test whether one of our client’s Google Ads Brand Search campaigns was driving incremental Shopify revenue or if we should allocate this relatively small spend elsewhere.

Our hypothesis was that since competitor ads were not appearing on brand search results pages for our client’s brand terms, we could afford to forgo paying Google to help users navigate to their intended destination; organic clicks to the website would take the place of paid clicks.

To test our hypothesis, we jointly decided to pause our two brand search campaigns in early December, after things had quieted down a bit after BFCM. We kept the campaigns paused for a period of 6 weeks, and then we turned the campaigns back on.

Using Google Search Console, we looked at organic brand search visitor data before, during and after the campaigns were paused, and we saw that organic search took up virtually all the slack of paid search clicks. (In a perfect world, we could also evaluate e-commerce revenue; but Google does not make this possible.)

Screenshots of the slack from the brand campaign being picked up by organic search from Dec 8th to Jan 21st.

For now, we have a high degree of confidence that we are not missing out on significant brand traffic by not bidding on our brand keyword terms. Should competitors’ (text) ads appear on our brand SERPs, we will likely turn our brand campaigns back on, to defend the brand.

Our view at Sum Digital is that generally it does make sense to bid on your branded terms, to defend the brand and crowd out competitors. We usually run brand search campaigns at 30-50x ROAS, so the overall % of Google Ads budget is typically in the low single digits.