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The ROAS Blind Spot in Your Google Ads Brand Bidding
Description
Most performance marketers assume brand bidding is a waste — you'd convert anyway, right? But new data from a 2025 Google Ads study across 1,200 e-commerce accounts shows that pausing brand campaigns can actually cost you 12-18% of total revenue. Lucas and Luna break down when brand bidding defends against competitor conquesting, how the 'free clicks' assumption breaks in competitive verticals, and why the real ROAS metric isn't ROAS at all — it's incremental lift measured through geo-holdout experiments. They walk through a concrete case: a DTC supplement brand that stopped brand bidding and saw organic brand search drop 23% within six weeks because competitors filled the gap with their own brand-term ads. Plus, a simple three-step test to run before you ever turn off brand campaigns.