Should You Put Branded Keyword Terms In A Separate Google Ad Campaign?

You're running a Google Search Ad Campaign, and you've decided to target your company's branded keyword terms like "Acme Inc." to ensure potential customers who are searching for you, find you and not your competition.

You just don't know if you should put them in the same campaign as your general terms (i.e. "blue widgets near me"), or would it be better to put the branded keyword terms in a separate Google Ad Campaign?

I always think it's best to put your branded keywords in their own campaign for a couple reasons:

1) Budget Control

When you separate the branded keywords out into their own campaign, you can have more control over the budget for each campaign, since budget is set on the campaign level and not the ad group level. This allows you to more easily hit 100% impression share for your branded campaign if that is your goal.

2) Easier To Optimize

The cost per conversion for your branded campaign is going to be much lower than the cost per conversion for your general terms campaign.

Why does that matter?

It skews the conversion data for the campaign and makes it more difficult to see how well your general terms campaign is really performing.

By separating them, it allows you to more easily identify the true cost per conversion for each and makes it easier to optimize them to improve performance.