Every paid media team has a brand search campaign. It sits at the top of the performance report with the lowest CPA, the highest ROAS, and the conversion volume that makes everything else in the account look pedestrian by comparison. The client sees those numbers and feels good. The agency sees those numbers and feels safe. And nobody asks the question that would make both of them uncomfortable.
Would those conversions have happened anyway?
The setup everyone recognizes
Here is the scenario. A nonprofit, or any brand with strong organic presence, runs paid search campaigns across branded and non-branded terms. The brand campaign targets the organization's own name and close variations. It captures people who are already looking for this specific brand. They type the name into Google, they see a paid ad at the top and an organic listing right below it, and they click the paid ad.
The agency reports that conversion at a $4 CPA. The non-brand prospecting campaign, which is doing the actual work of finding new people, reports at a $38 CPA. In a performance review, the brand campaign looks ten times more efficient. In reality, the brand campaign is mostly taking credit for demand that already existed.
This is the brand search dilemma. And the reason it persists across the entire industry is that every stakeholder at the table has a slightly different incentive around it.
The five players
There are typically five perspectives in this conversation, and they rarely align cleanly.
The platform
Google's recommendation engine will always encourage you to run brand search. Their reps will tell you that competitors are bidding on your brand terms, that organic click-through rates drop without paid coverage, and that the incremental lift from paid brand is significant. Google has published studies supporting this. What Google will not tell you is that for most brands with strong organic authority, the vast majority of brand search clicks would have gone to the organic listing if the paid ad were not there. Google makes money every time someone clicks the paid ad instead of the free organic result. Their incentive is clear.
The agency
The agency managing the paid media account has a more nuanced but equally conflicted position. Brand search is the easiest campaign to manage. It performs well with minimal optimization. It inflates the blended CPA across the account, making the agency's overall numbers look better. And it contributes to managed spend, which in many agency compensation models directly ties to revenue. An agency recommending the elimination of brand search is recommending a reduction in its own managed budget and a deterioration in its own reported metrics. Some agencies will make that recommendation anyway because it is the right thing to do. Many will not bring it up unless the client does.
The client-side marketer
This is the person who sits between the agency and the executive team. They see the brand search numbers in every report. They may or may not understand incrementality, but they know that pulling brand search will make every subsequent report look worse. Even if the total business outcome is the same, because those conversions shift to organic, the paid media report now shows fewer conversions at a higher CPA. That is a hard thing to explain to an executive who has been conditioned to evaluate marketing on platform-reported ROAS.
The analytics lead
This person thinks about measurement differently. They care about incrementality, meaning the conversions that would not have happened without the ad spend. They may run holdout tests or geo-lift studies or use marketing mix models. When they look at brand search, they see a campaign that is largely capturing existing demand rather than creating new demand. They want the budget reallocated to channels and campaigns that actually drive incremental growth. To them, brand search is an expensive way to cannibalize your own organic traffic.
The CFO or executive sponsor
This person sees a total marketing budget and wants to know what it is producing. If someone tells them that a meaningful percentage of their search budget is going toward people who would have found them for free, they will want that money redirected or cut. But they also do not want to see a performance report that suddenly looks worse, even if the underlying business results have not changed. This creates a political problem layered on top of a measurement problem.
The incrementality question
The core issue is incrementality, and it is genuinely complicated.
Not all brand search spend is wasted. There are legitimate scenarios where paid brand coverage provides value. If a competitor is aggressively bidding on your brand terms, paid coverage protects your real estate at the top of the search results page. If you are running a promotion or time-sensitive campaign, a paid ad with customized copy and sitelinks can outperform your standard organic listing. If your organic listing has a low quality score or your site has technical SEO problems, paid coverage can fill the gap.
But for most established brands with strong organic presence, the majority of brand search conversions are not incremental. Study after study, including Google's own research when read carefully, shows that the incremental lift from paid brand search is typically 5 to 15 percent of total brand search conversions. That means 85 to 95 percent of those conversions would have happened through the organic listing.
An agency reporting a $4 CPA on brand search is often reporting a true incremental CPA closer to $30 to $80 when you account for the organic cannibalization. At that point, the brand campaign is not the account's best performer. It is roughly equivalent to the non-brand campaigns, which are at least bringing in people who were not already looking for you.
The nonprofit wrinkle
This conversation gets especially interesting for nonprofits, and it applies to any organization eligible for Google Ad Grants.
Google Ad Grants provides qualifying nonprofits with up to $10,000 per month in free search advertising. The grant comes with restrictions, including quality score requirements, a 5% CTR minimum, and text ads on Search only. There is a $2 CPC cap on manual bidding, though that cap is lifted when using Smart Bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions, which actually makes the Grant more competitive than it used to be. For brand terms specifically, the Grant covers them effectively. A nonprofit running paid brand search with its own budget while sitting on an unused or underutilized Ad Grant is literally paying for something it could get for free.
The smart configuration is Grant-first on brand terms. Let the Ad Grant cover brand searches. Only layer in paid brand coverage when the Grant budget is exhausted, when a competitor is actively bidding on your terms, or during high-traffic periods where the Grant's daily budget runs out before the day ends. That approach preserves the full paid budget for non-brand prospecting, where the money is actually creating new demand rather than capturing demand that would have arrived organically or through the free Grant.
But here is where the agency incentive problem gets sharper. If the agency manages both the paid account and the Grant account, moving brand search to the Grant reduces the paid account's managed spend, its conversion volume, and its blended CPA. The Grant conversions may not even be included in the agency's performance report, depending on how reporting is structured. The agency just made its own numbers look worse while making the client's overall economics better. That is the right move, but it requires an agency that prioritizes client outcomes over its own optics.
Why this conversation is so hard to have
The reason brand search persists as a default across the industry is not that people are uninformed. It is that the conversation requires someone to absorb a short-term optics hit for a long-term strategic gain, and the incentive structures do not reward that.
If the agency raises the issue, they risk reducing their own managed spend and making their performance reports look worse. If the client-side marketer raises it, they have to explain to their boss why the next report shows fewer conversions. If the analytics lead raises it, they are positioned as the person who made things worse on paper, even if the business outcome improved.
The brand search dilemma is really a measurement and incentive alignment problem disguised as a media strategy question. The media strategy is straightforward: do not pay for traffic you would get for free. The hard part is building a reporting framework where everyone at the table can see the true impact without someone's performance evaluation taking a hit.
What the right answer actually looks like
The right answer is not to eliminate brand search entirely. It is to treat brand search as a defensive tactic rather than a growth driver, and to measure it accordingly.
Run incrementality tests. Turn off paid brand search in a subset of markets or time periods and measure the actual impact on total conversions, paid plus organic combined. If total conversions barely move, you have your answer. If there is a meaningful drop, you know the true incremental value and can size the brand campaign appropriately.
For organizations with access to free ad inventory like Google Ad Grants, use the free inventory first. Paid brand should only activate when the free option is exhausted or insufficient.
Restructure reporting so that brand and non-brand performance are always shown separately. Blending them together hides the true cost of acquisition for new customers. Every stakeholder should be able to see what the account looks like without brand search propping up the averages.
And most importantly, align incentives. If the agency is compensated on managed spend or blended CPA, they will never voluntarily recommend cutting brand search. If they are compensated on incremental growth or total business outcomes, paid plus organic, they will optimize for what actually matters.
The brand search dilemma is one of those problems that everyone in paid media knows about but few people talk about openly because the status quo is comfortable for almost everyone. The agency looks good. The platform makes money. The reports look strong. The only person who loses is the one writing the check.
That is starting to change. As more client-side teams invest in incrementality measurement and marketing mix modeling, the brand search conversation is going to get louder. The agencies and consultants who get ahead of it, who bring this conversation to their clients proactively rather than waiting to be caught, will be the ones who build the deepest trust.
The ones who keep inflating their reports with brand search conversions they know are not incremental will eventually get called on it. And by then, the trust will already be gone.
Jason Dellaripa is a media strategy leader with 20 years of experience across pharma, financial services, and regulated industries. Learn more or read about local advertising strategy.