If your Google Ads account reports a 6x ROAS and most of the spend is on your own brand name, you are mostly paying to reach people who already decided to buy from you. The blended number hides that. Separating trademark (branded) search from non-brand search is the first thing we do when we take over an account, and it usually changes the conversation.
What trademark search actually measures
Someone who types your brand name into Google has already heard of you: a past customer, a referral, someone who saw your ad elsewhere. Branded clicks are cheap and convert well, so trademark campaigns post a very high return. That is real revenue, but it is not new demand. A share of it would have arrived through the organic listing anyway.
How blending inflates the account
Suppose an account spends $2,000 on brand at 8x and $8,000 on non-brand at 2x. The blended ROAS is 3.2x. An agency that shifts $2,000 more into brand and pulls it from non-brand now reports 4.4x, with fewer new customers. The dashboard improved; the business did not.
We saw this pattern with Vim & Vigr. Their previous agency was exploiting the high efficiency of trademark searches to inflate overall returns, while spending very little on non-trademark searches, where most net-new customers are found.
How to separate them
- Put branded terms in their own campaign with exact and phrase match on your brand name and common misspellings.
- Add your brand terms as negatives in every non-brand campaign.
- Report the two side by side every week: spend, conversions, cost per conversion, ROAS.
- Set targets separately. Non-brand will always look worse than brand; judge it against its own history and your margin, not against the blended number.
- Watch for brand cannibalization: if organic brand clicks fall when brand ads run, part of the brand campaign is paying for traffic you already owned.
What to expect after you split
Non-brand efficiency will look lower on day one because it is no longer being averaged with brand. Then it improves, because the budget and the attention finally go there. When TAS restructured Vim & Vigr's non-brand campaigns for manual management, new bid strategies and a full system of bid modifiers, the account saw +12% click volume, −29% cost per click and +15% paid search ROAS in three months, without giving up the efficient brand traffic.
Questions to ask your agency this week
- What share of last month's spend was on brand terms?
- What is non-brand ROAS on its own?
- Are brand terms negatived out of non-brand campaigns?
- Has brand spend grown faster than non-brand spend over the last six months?
If the answers are slow to arrive, the blended number is doing a lot of work.