OK, I’ll say it. In many cases, branded search is a waste of money.

To recap, branded search ads are the ads you see when you bid on your own brand’s name on Google. If I’m Toyota and I bid on “Toyota Camry” that’s branded search. If I bid on “best crossover SUV,” that’s non-brand search.

Non-brand search is great and, if you bid correctly, should get you incremental customers profitably. Branded search, though, has a major flaw.

That flaw is the question of whether the customers you acquire through branded search are truly incremental. For example, if the first organic search for Le Creuset is…Le Creuset’s direct-to-consumer site, paying Google to put another link right above this one which goes to the same or a similar webpage is questionable. If you didn’t pay for the branded search result, the customer would click on the organic result anyway!

“But Ben”, I hear you object, “won’t my competitors bid on my branded search terms if I don’t? Customers are trying to come to my site–I can’t let a competitor scoop them up!” Fair enough. But don’t forget that branded search has a cost: the de facto tax you are paying Google each time someone clicks on a paid link to your site. It’s possible that a competitor conquesting your keywords will lead to some loss of traffic, but not paying the tax on all of the organic clicks that would have been paid clicks is a huge benefit.

More specifically, there is an incrementality analysis to be done here. At Hubble, for example, we tested branded search incrementality by turning off branded keyword bidding for two months in a key geography. We saw no discernible impact on any of our metrics or sales. We soon expanded the test to more geographies and still…nothing. Eventually we decided to turn off branded search entirely. Is it possible that there was some immeasurable brand cost to this decision? Yes. But that felt like spooky action at a distance to us. We were paying real dollars every day branded search was on.

To be clear, I’m not saying that branded search is never worth it. It often is. Maybe your competitor’s brand is way better-known than yours and if a potential customer sees their brand, they’re likely to jump ship. And of course if you are not the top organic result for certain branded keywords, that really increases the likelihood you should bid on ads for those keywords.

But that’s my point. This requires real analysis and work and you shouldn’t assume that your branded search clicks are incremental or worth it across the board. And who knows: if they aren’t, you, like Hubble, can significantly reduce your ad budget and acquire the same number of customers.

Probably going to get some hate especially from my agency friends on this one but please let me know what you think!