Branded Keywords in Google

Unpopular opinion

I’ve been reading Click Here by Alex Schultz, CMO of Meta, which was released a few weeks ago.

Finally, someone wrote a modern guide on digital marketing. As someone who works with ads at scale, I already knew many of the concepts, but a few things were new to me.

One of his pieces of advice stood out – don’t buy branded search terms on Google. Mainly because those people will convert anyway, as they’re already looking for your brand specifically. This goes against the common zero-sum game – that if we don’t buy those keywords, competitors will outbid us and steal our conversions.

Intrigued, I decided to check our own numbers.

Apparently, once you reach a certain market share, there’s an even stronger reason to stop buying branded keywords. More and more of your existing users start using Google just to reach your product. Instead of typing your domain name directly, they just type the company name into Google Search – and click the first link, which is often an ad.

That’s where the problems begin.

First, we end up paying for users who already have an active account.
Second, instead of being taken straight to the app, these users have to go through the entire onboarding flow before they can reach the sign-in screen. Not ideal.
And third, this traffic contaminates our funnel data – conversion rates drop, and the numbers become less reliable.

And it’s not just a small share of traffic – we’re talking about a significant share.

Now, there are a couple of ways to fix this:

1. Set up exclusions.
   Google Ads allows you to sync a list of your existing users so ads won’t be shown to them. In this case, the exclusion list should include all registered users, not just paying ones, since their probability to convert is much lower than that of new users. Besides, for existing users, we already have better channels like email or in-app messages.

2. Stop paying for branded keywords.
   Ideally, this should be tested through an experiment. If we stop paying, will we see an increase in organic conversions through SEO? Even if not all the traffic shifts to organic, winning back the rest with paid branded ads may still be too expensive. For example, if we lose only 20% of conversions, it means we’re paying 5x more to get those 20%.

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