What is brand search?

Ads shown to people who search your brand’s name.

Brand search ads appear when someone searches your brand’s name, or the name of your show, game or product. They usually look like the best ads you run: cheap clicks, lots of conversions, great ROAS.

They look great because the people typing your name were already looking for you. Some brand search spend is sensible, for example when a competitor bids on your name. But a big share of the results credited to it would likely have arrived through the free listing right below the ad. The only way to know how much is to pause it somewhere and watch.

Why it matters

People typing your name were already looking for you. Paying for those clicks can make a channel look great while doing little.

An example

Example (made-up numbers): three channels report 4,200 results for a quarter, and 1,380 hold up against the brand’s own numbers. Of the results that don’t, 470 came from people who were already searching the brand’s name.

Where it misleads

Treating brand search ROAS as proof that search is your best channel. It mostly measures how many people already knew your name.

How Arcus handles it

In every spend report we separate results from people searching your name and show how much credit each channel took for them. When that number is big enough to matter, we suggest a test: pause brand search in some regions and compare sales with the regions where it keeps running.

More in our guide: Incrementality, explained without the math