Sam Piliero made the essential point on the 2X eCommerce Podcast that we need to stop fooling ourselves about branded search. Someone doesn't just wake up and magically have the thought to type your brand name into Google. That search is the result of your other marketing efforts, not the cause of a new sale. The problem isn't necessarily fraudulent bot clicks, but the fraudulent way we credit brand campaigns for sales they didn't truly generate.
His argument is that when you blend branded search data with your other campaigns like Performance Max or general shopping, you're contaminating your results. Brand campaigns will almost always have a phenomenal return on ad spend, but it's mostly from customers who were already on their way to buy from you. Allowing that data to mix with your prospecting campaigns makes them look more effective than they are, leading you to invest in the wrong places. The platforms are excellent at capturing conversions that were going to happen anyway, and branded search is the primary vehicle for this.
To fix this, Sam recommends a specific structure for your Google Ads account. You need to break it out completely. Set up dedicated branded search and branded shopping campaigns. Then, for your main prospecting efforts, you must set up brand exclusions in Performance Max and other non-brand campaigns. This clean separation is the only way to know what your prospecting is actually driving. It lets you evaluate the true performance of your acquisition efforts without the artificial lift from people who already know you.
Tony Chopp from Ecommerce Playbook strongly agrees with this approach. He stated that the number one principle for structuring a profitable Google Ads account is separating campaigns by brand and non-brand (or acquisition). He sees it as the fundamental first step before you can even think about running incrementality tests. By creating this division, you can get a real read on the value of your brand cohort versus new customers. This structure gives you the clarity to stop overvaluing the clicks you were already going to get and start properly measuring the clicks that are actually growing your business.
