The Brand Campaign Trap: How Google Profits From Your Brand Loyalty

There is a quiet transfer of wealth happening inside Google Ads, and most advertisers do not realise they are part of it. Every month, businesses around the world spend billions of pounds bidding on their own brand names — paying Google for clicks they would largely receive for free through organic search.

This is the brand campaign trap. It is not a conspiracy. It is not a bug. It is an entirely predictable outcome of how Google's advertising platform is designed. And once you understand the dynamics, you will see why it is so difficult to escape.

The machine that prints money

Google's advertising revenue in 2025 exceeded $260 billion. A meaningful slice of that comes from brand campaigns — advertisers paying to appear at the top of search results for their own name.

Think about that for a moment. When someone searches "Tesco," Tesco pays Google for that click. The searcher was already looking for Tesco. They were going to end up on Tesco's website regardless. But Tesco pays anyway.

Why? Because the alternative feels worse. If Tesco stops bidding, competitors can swoop in and steal that traffic. Or so the logic goes.

This fear — the fear of losing traffic you already own — is the engine that drives the brand campaign trap. Google did not create this fear deliberately (probably), but the platform's incentive structure ensures it persists.

How the trap works

The brand campaign trap operates through a self-reinforcing cycle that is remarkably difficult to break.

Stage 1: You launch a brand campaign

Most brand campaigns start for a reasonable-sounding reason. Perhaps an agency recommended it. Perhaps a competitor started bidding on your name. Perhaps you noticed your brand name in a Google Ads keyword suggestion and thought "why not?"

The early results look brilliant. Your brand campaign shows a 10:1 or even 20:1 return on ad spend. Click costs are pennies. Conversion rates are through the roof. It looks like the best-performing campaign in your account.

Stage 2: You celebrate the results

Your brand campaign quickly becomes the star of your Google Ads account. In monthly reports, it is the campaign with the lowest CPA, the highest ROAS, and the best conversion rate. Agencies love presenting these numbers because they make the overall account look healthy.

No one stops to ask the uncomfortable question: would these conversions have happened anyway?

Stage 3: Competitors appear

Over time, competitors notice the opportunity and start bidding on your brand terms. This is visible in your Auction Insights report as new names appearing with increasing impression share.

Now your brand CPCs start creeping up. Where you were paying 8p per click, you are paying 40p, then 80p, then £1.20. The campaign still looks profitable, but the costs are growing.

Stage 4: Fear locks you in

At this point, you are trapped. You know that pausing the campaign will hand the top position to your competitors. You have seen their ads appearing alongside yours. The thought of giving them that real estate — right when someone is searching for you by name — is terrifying.

So you keep spending. And the spend keeps growing as more competitors enter the auction and bid prices rise.

Stage 5: The sunk cost fallacy takes hold

After months or years of running a brand campaign, it becomes an unquestioned part of your advertising strategy. It has always been there. It has always shown good results. Questioning it feels like questioning gravity.

But those good results are largely an illusion. The campaign is taking credit for traffic that was already coming to you. It is like paying someone to hold open a door that was already open.

Google wins twice

The elegant (or cynical, depending on your perspective) aspect of brand bidding is that Google profits from both sides of the equation.

When a competitor bids on your brand name, Google earns revenue from their clicks. When you run a brand campaign to defend against that competitor, Google earns revenue from your clicks too. The more competitors who enter the auction, the higher the bids go on both sides, and the more Google earns.

Google has no incentive to discourage this behaviour. The platform could easily offer brand owners the ability to block competitor ads on their brand terms — the way trademark holders can restrict ad copy. But that would reduce auction competition and lower revenue.

Instead, Google offers brand exclusions for Performance Max campaigns (after years of pressure from advertisers) and trademark restrictions on ad copy. These are half-measures that address symptoms while preserving the underlying dynamic that generates revenue.

The incrementality problem

The core issue with brand campaigns is incrementality: what percentage of the clicks and conversions attributed to your brand campaign are genuinely additional? How many would have happened anyway through your organic listing?

Research and testing consistently point to the same uncomfortable answer. For most brands, the majority of brand campaign traffic is not incremental.

A widely cited study by eBay found that when they paused brand advertising, they lost virtually no traffic. The clicks simply shifted from paid to organic. Google's own research acknowledged that, on average, 89% of ad clicks are incremental — but that figure includes all campaigns, and brand campaigns score significantly lower than generic campaigns on incrementality.

Industry practitioners who run incrementality tests typically find that 50% to 80% of brand campaign clicks would have occurred organically. Some find the number is even higher.

This means a brand campaign spending £5,000 per month might be generating only £1,000 to £2,500 in truly incremental value. The remaining £2,500 to £4,000 is a transfer of money from the advertiser to Google for traffic that would have been free.

Over a year, that is £30,000 to £48,000 in waste. For larger advertisers, the numbers run into millions.

Why agencies rarely challenge this

If the economics are this unfavourable, why don't agencies flag the problem? Several reasons.

Revenue incentive: Agencies that charge a percentage of ad spend have a direct financial incentive to keep spend high. Brand campaigns add to the total, which adds to the fee.

Metric inflation: Brand campaigns make account-level metrics look better. When you blend brand and non-brand performance, the overall CPA drops, the overall ROAS rises, and the monthly report looks healthier. Removing brand campaigns makes the underlying non-brand performance more visible — and it might not look as good.

Risk aversion: Recommending that a client pause their brand campaign is a high-risk suggestion for an agency. If the client loses traffic or revenue during the test period, the agency takes the blame. If the test shows the campaign was unnecessary, the client might question why the agency recommended it in the first place.

Genuine uncertainty: To be fair, the incrementality question is genuinely complex. The answer varies by brand, by industry, by competitive landscape, and by time. An agency that recommends caution is not necessarily being self-serving — they may genuinely not know the answer.

The fear cycle

The brand campaign trap is sustained by fear. Specifically, the fear of three things:

Fear of competitor poaching

"If I stop bidding, competitors will steal my traffic." This is the most common fear, and it is partially justified. When competitors are actively bidding on your brand terms, pausing your brand campaign does give them more visibility. The question is how much traffic you actually lose versus how much simply shifts to organic.

Fear of losing data

"I need the brand campaign for search terms data and audience insights." There is some truth to this — brand campaigns do provide useful data. But this data is also available through Google Search Console and other tools, and it is rarely worth thousands of pounds per month.

Fear of the unknown

"I don't know what will happen if I turn it off." This is the most honest fear, and the most addressable. You can find out exactly what will happen by running a controlled incrementality test. Test in one region or for one time period, measure the impact, and make a data-driven decision.

How to break free

Breaking out of the brand campaign trap does not necessarily mean turning off your brand campaign. It means making an informed decision rather than a fear-based one. Here is a practical path.

Step 1: Measure your current state

Start by understanding what your brand campaign is actually doing. Check your Auction Insights to see who is competing on your brand terms. Review your impression share — if you already have 95%+ impression share, competitors are barely visible. Use our brand spend calculator to estimate your potential waste.

Step 2: Run an incrementality test

The only way to know your true incremental lift is to test it. Choose a representative geographic region, pause brand ads there for 2-4 weeks, and compare overall traffic and conversions against a control region where brand ads remain active. We have written a detailed guide to running this test.

Step 3: Evaluate the results

If pausing brand ads in the test region caused a meaningful drop in traffic and conversions (beyond what shifted to organic), your brand campaign has genuine incrementality and is worth running — but probably at a lower budget than you think.

If traffic barely changed (most of it shifted to organic clicks), you have been paying for traffic that was already yours. You can safely reduce or eliminate brand spend.

Step 4: Optimise or eliminate

Based on your test results, take one of three actions:

Continue with adjustments: If incrementality is moderate (20-50%), keep the brand campaign but reduce bids and budget. You do not need to pay top prices for traffic that is mostly coming to you anyway.

Pause and monitor: If incrementality is low (under 20%), pause the campaign entirely and redirect the budget to non-brand campaigns where the incremental value is higher. Monitor your organic traffic closely for the first few weeks.

Conditional activation: Set up automated SERP monitoring to detect when competitors start bidding on your brand terms. Only activate your brand campaign when competitors are present, and pause it when they are not.

Step 5: Redirect savings to growth

The money you save on brand campaigns should go directly into non-brand campaigns that drive genuinely new customers. These campaigns have lower ROAS on paper but higher true incrementality — every click is a customer who was not already looking for you.

The uncomfortable truth

The brand campaign trap persists because it is comfortable. Brand campaigns produce flattering numbers. They are low-risk in the sense that they rarely fail dramatically. And they feel like the responsible thing to do — after all, you are "protecting your brand."

But comfort is not the same as effectiveness. Every pound spent on a non-incremental brand click is a pound that could have been spent acquiring a genuinely new customer. Over months and years, that misallocation compounds into a significant competitive disadvantage.

The businesses that thrive in paid search are the ones willing to question their assumptions, test their campaigns, and redirect spend from what looks good to what actually works.

If you are ready to find out what your brand campaign is really worth, start with a free brand audit. We will show you exactly who is bidding on your brand, what your current exposure looks like, and how much you could save by optimising your approach.

The trap is real. But so is the exit.