Brand Term Bidding: Should You Pay for Your Own Brand Name? (With an −80% CPA Case Study)

"Why are we paying for clicks from people who were already searching for us?" Every finance director asks it eventually, and it's a fair question. Brand search campaigns usually have the best-looking ROAS in the account, but much of that return would have arrived anyway through the organic listing sitting just below the ad. The real answer is that it depends on who else is bidding on your name. When competitors move in, the economics of brand bidding change fast.

What is brand term bidding?

Brand term bidding means running paid search ads on your own brand name and its variants: the brand on its own, the brand plus "login", "app", "bonus" or "promo code", and common misspellings. Because the searcher already wants you, brand clicks are usually cheap and convert at the highest rate in the account. The question isn't whether they convert. It's whether you needed to pay for them.

Does bidding on your own brand actually add sales?

The research gives a clear "it depends":

• Without competitors, the lift is small. eBay famously switched off its brand ads on Yahoo and Bing, and found almost all the lost clicks simply moved to its organic listing (Blake, Nosko and Tadelis, Econometrica, 2015). A later study of thousands of brands on Bing found a causal lift of only about 1–4% when no competitors were present, with the smallest lift for the biggest brands (Simonov, Nosko and Rao, Marketing Science, 2018).
• With competitors, it's defensive and incremental. The same Bing research found that when a competitor bids on your brand and you don't, you lose around 17 percentage points of click share. Those are customers searching for you by name, landing on someone else.

So brand bidding is mostly insurance. The more competitors, affiliates and aggregators bidding on your name, the more valuable that insurance becomes. That's especially true in iGaming, where your brand term is some of the most contested inventory in the market.

Can competitors bid on your brand name?

Yes. Google doesn't restrict trademarks as keywords, so a competitor can bid on your brand name in most regions. What Google does restrict, once you file a trademark complaint, is competitors using your trademark in their ad text. Complaints go through Google's legal troubleshooter, apply to specific advertisers and countries, and require proof of your rights. Filing one won't stop the bidding, but it does stop competitors putting your name in their headline, and that makes your own ad the obvious click.

How do Performance Max and AI Max affect brand campaigns?

This is where many accounts quietly overpay. Performance Max will happily serve on your brand searches and claim the conversions, often at a higher cost than a dedicated brand campaign. The rules worth knowing:

• A search term that exactly matches an exact-match keyword in a Search campaign takes priority over Performance Max. So a tight exact-match brand campaign wins its own traffic.
• Add brand exclusions to Performance Max so it focuses on new demand. On Search campaigns, brand inclusion and exclusion settings now sit inside AI Max.
• Some newer surfaces, including AI Overviews, AI Mode, Lens and autocomplete, aren't treated as identical matches. So keyword priority isn't guaranteed there; watch where brand traffic actually lands.
• Turn down "remove redundant keywords" style recommendations that would fold your brand keywords into broad match.

Case study: how a casino brand cut brand CPA by 80%

A European regulated casino brand came to us with a problem every operator recognises. Aggressive competitor bidding had pushed its brand CPCs up five times. Affiliates, rival operators and aggregators were all bidding on the brand name, and the brand campaign was being dragged into an auction it should never have had to fight.

The answer wasn't to outbid everyone. It was one structural change to how the brand campaigns were built: no bid war and no extra budget. The results:

• Brand CPA: €309 → €62 (−80%)
• CPCs: −77%
• Spend: −78%
• Conversions: +11%

More conversions on less than a quarter of the spend. That's the difference between a brand campaign set up by default and one set up on purpose.

A brand bidding checklist

• Run an auction insights check. If nobody else is on your brand, test reducing brand spend with a holdout and measure what organic picks up.
• Keep a dedicated exact-match brand campaign with its own budget, so brand never borrows from, or hides inside, prospecting budgets.
• Exclude brand from Performance Max and review where brand conversions are being reported.
• File trademark complaints in the markets where you hold the rights.
• Police affiliate brand bidding in your affiliate terms. Paying a commission on a customer who searched your name is the most expensive brand click there is.
• Report brand and non-brand separately. A blended ROAS that includes brand makes everything look better than it is.

Want the rest of the account read the same way? See how to read a PPC account like a book and how Google Ads works in 2026. Or let us run it as part of our performance media service.