Brand vs Non-Brand

Brand campaigns target people searching your own name, while non-brand campaigns target the generic terms people use when they do not yet know you, and mixing them in your reporting hides the truth about what is working.

You look at your account and one campaign has a gorgeous return, the cheapest clicks and the highest conversion rate you have. That is almost always your brand campaign, and it looks that good because those people already knew you and were coming anyway. They typed your name. Capturing them is cheap and worth doing, but most of those sales were going to happen with or without the ad. Non-brand is the harder, more expensive work: bidding on the generic phrases describing your product, in front of people who have never heard of you. It costs more per click and converts worse, and it is where actual new customers come from.

Split them into separate campaigns so you can judge each on its own merits and fund the growth work properly instead of starving it.

Brand flatters the whole account. Blend brand and non-brand together and the cheap, would-have-converted-anyway brand sales drag your average return up, so the blended number looks great while your real new-customer engine might be losing money. Judging the account on a figure that hides brand hides the problem. Separate them, then look at non-brand and incremental performance honestly.

A great blended ROAS often just means your customers already knew your name.