Even if your website ranks organically for searches around your company name, it’s worth setting up brand and non-brand campaigns in Google. That’s because other companies can pay to use your name on Google.

Another reason is that Google always defaults to the easiest way to get clicks, and oftentimes, the easiest is serving it to people who already know your company name – i.e. not new customers. Fortunately, these one answer to both of these problems: splitting brand and non-brand campaigns.

Chantelle Bowyer founded Metis, a paid media agency, was a trainer for Google and now spends most of her time auditing SA accounts. This is one of the first things she flags every time. "We recently audited a PMax campaign that looked like it was crushing it. The client was about to put more money in, but he hadn't excluded his brand name, so all the conversions were on the brand. He'd have made completely the wrong decisions about where to put his budget."

The fix is one campaign for people searching your company name and one for everyone who doesn't know you yet. Simple in principle, but most accounts never do it.

Brand and non-brand keywords have completely different economics. Someone typing your company name is already warm and converting them is cheap. Someone typing a generic term is a cold stranger. Bidding the same way on both makes no sense, and bundling them means you can never see clearly what's driving real growth versus just capturing existing awareness.

Pull your company name, common misspellings and any branded product names into their own Google Search campaign. Write the ads differently here: these people already know you, so skip the introduction and focus on getting them to take the next step.

One reason to run this, even if you're ranking organically, is that competitors are allowed to bid on your name. If you're not defending your own brand term, someone else may be sitting above you when a warm prospect goes looking. And this is not expensive, Chantelle puts brand clicks at R2 to R5 each, depending on how competitive the term is.

This campaign targets everyone who hasn't heard of you yet. Use generic terms that describe your product or service, not your company name. Be deliberate about match types. Google will push broad match and promise the algorithm will sort it out, but Chantelle's experience running SA accounts cuts against that. 

"Google's best practice advice is based on huge budgets and overseas markets. They do not think of South Africa when putting those recommendations together. We find that getting more specific does better." Start with an exact or phrase match, then broaden once you understand what's actually converting.

This is the step most accounts miss, and it's what makes the separation work. Go into your non-brand campaign and add your company name (be sure to include variations of it, too) as a negative keyword. Without this, the two campaigns compete against each other, the data from both gets muddied, and you still can't tell what's driving new business.

Brand conversions are cheaper and easier – tighter budget, tighter CPA target. Non-brand is your real growth engine and deserves a bigger allocation and a more realistic expectation of what a conversion costs. Chantelle's rule of thumb: brand might cost R50 per acquisition; non-brand might cost R1 000. If they're bundled together, you'll never see that gap and you'll keep making budget decisions based on a blended average that flatters the easy wins.

For brand ads: short, direct, action-oriented. These people know you already.

For non-brand ads: make sure your keyword appears in the ad text. Google scores relevance across the keyword, the ad and the landing page. The more coherent that chain, the better your quality score and the lower your cost per click. Keep it painfully simple. If someone searches for peaches, they should see an ad about peaches and land on a page about peaches. Don’t target “peaches,” run an ad for apples, and send people to a page about bananas.

SA ad budgets are smaller than the benchmarks Google optimises for. The platform's default behaviour is to blend brand and non-brand and optimise for overall conversions, and that works fine with a massive spend cushion. Most SA founders don't have one. Every rand needs to be working, which means you can't afford to let Google quietly spend it on the path of least resistance.

SA search volumes are also lower than international markets, which makes clean data more valuable, not less. If brand keywords are contaminating your non-brand data, you may only discover it months later, after you've made the wrong budget calls repeatedly.

This post is drawn from Chantelle Bowyer's masterclass on the Founder Collab, Paid Ads 101. The full session covers the complete paid media system for SA businesses, not just campaign structure, but how all the pieces connect.

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