Brand Term Pollution - The Google Ads Issue I See In Almost Every Audit

There’s one issue I come across more than any other when I’m auditing Google Ads accounts for new clients.

I call it brand term pollution, and once you know what to look for, you’ll start spotting it everywhere.

Here’s how it works. Depending on how an account is set up, what campaign types are being used (Performance Max is a big offender here), and whether broad match or phrase match keywords are in play, brand terms have a sneaky habit of creeping into campaigns that were never meant to target them.

Let’s use an example everyone will recognise. Say you’re Apple, and you’re running a search campaign for laptops aimed at students. You’re promoting the MacBook, and you’ve built ad groups around keywords like “best laptop for students” and “best laptop for college”.

Sounds straightforward enough. Generic, non branded keywords, targeting people who are researching their options.

The problem is, if you don’t have proper negative keyword controls in place, Google will often serve your ads against searches like “best Apple laptop for students” or “MacBook for university” too. Suddenly your “generic” campaign isn’t just reaching people comparing options. It’s also reaching people who already know exactly who they want to buy from.

And these are two completely different types of customer.

Someone searching for your brand by name already knows you, and is likely well down the path towards buying from you. Someone searching a generic, category level term is still working out who they want to buy from at all. They might end up choosing you, or they might not.

Brand searches convert at a wildly higher rate. It’s not unusual to see conversion rates five, ten, even twenty times higher than non branded traffic. They’re cheaper per click too, and they tend to have far stronger click through rates.

So when you blend the two together in your reporting, something odd happens. The headline numbers look fantastic. Clicks are up, cost per click is down, conversions are rolling in, return on ad spend looks brilliant. You’d be forgiven for thinking the campaign is firing on all cylinders.

But dig into the search terms report, and quite often a very different picture emerges.

In my experience, it’s common to find an account where branded terms make up 10% or less of total spend (because the cost per click is so much lower), but anywhere from 50% to 90% of conversions. I audited an account recently where 98% of conversions were coming from branded search terms. Almost the entire result was people who already knew the business, not new customers being won over by the advertising.

That’s a problem, because it means the “performance” being reported isn’t really telling you what you think it’s telling you.

Why does this happen so often?

Honestly, a lot of the time it’s not malicious. It’s just that unless someone is deliberately checking for it and actively controlling for it with negative keywords, it tends to happen by default.

There’s also a less charitable explanation. If you’re an agency, freelancer, or in-house staff member running someone’s ads, letting a bit of brand demand bleed into your “prospecting” campaigns makes your results look a whole lot better. Nobody wants to walk into a meeting and explain why the non branded campaign is underperforming, so this kind of thing often goes unchecked, sometimes because it isn’t being looked for at all, and sometimes because it’s quietly convenient that it isn’t.

How to check if it’s happening to you

If you want to find out whether this is going on in your own account, head over to my website and use the free search term analysis tool.

All you need to do is export a search terms report from Google Ads (account wide, campaign level, or ad group level, whatever you want to look at), upload the CSV exactly as Google gives it to you, and enter your brand name along with any common variations.

The tool will then break down how much of your ad spend, impressions, clicks and conversions are coming from branded search versus genuine non branded activity. No spreadsheet wrangling required.

What to do if you find it

First up, to be clear, this isn’t an argument against running ads on your own brand terms. Whether that’s worthwhile is a separate conversation entirely.

The issue is when brand and non brand activity get mixed together in the same campaign, because it stops you from getting an honest read on how your non branded prospecting is actually performing.

The fix is fairly simple in principle. Set up a dedicated campaign just for your brand and product names (so for Apple, that would be terms like Apple, MacBook, iPad and so on). Then make sure every other campaign, including any Performance Max campaigns, has those same terms properly excluded using negative keywords.

Performance Max is particularly prone to this, since you have far less visibility and control over where your ads actually show. It’s very common to find a Performance Max campaign whose seemingly strong results are being propped up almost entirely by brand term capture, without anyone realising it.

If you’ve got someone else running your Google Ads, it’s worth having a direct conversation with them about whether this is happening in your account, and if so, what’s being done about it. Sometimes the agency or specialist genuinely doesn’t know, simply because nobody has dug deep enough into the search terms to check.

Either way, getting an honest split between brand and non brand performance is one of the simplest ways to understand what your Google Ads spend is actually achieving, rather than what it merely appears to be achieving.

If you’ve got any questions, drop a comment below or flick me an email at info@samfrost.co.nz. Thanks for reading, and I’ll catch you in the next one.