Solved: Target Impression or Smart Bidding for Brand?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Regarding your enquiry about your brand search campaign, it's a great question. While it seems simple on the surface, the answer really opens up a bigger conversation about what brand campaigns are for and how to get the most out of them. It's often not just about picking a bidding strategy; it's about owning your search result page and making it work harder for you.

I'm happy to give you some guidance on this.

We'll need to look at your core assumption first...

Okay, the very first thing we need to challenge is this idea that "no competitor is bidding on our brand name." I hear this a lot, and nine times out of ten, it's a dangerous assumption. You might not have direct competitors actively targeting your brand keywords, but that doesn't mean the search results page is empty. You’ve got other players to think about:

• -> Resellers & Affiliates: If you sell through partners, they might be bidding on your name to drive traffic to their own sites. This isn't always a bad thing, but you need to know about it.
• -> Review Sites & Publications: Sites like Trustpilot, Capterra, or industry blogs might be running ads on generic terms that happen to match with your brand name, especially if it includes a generic word.
• -> Indirect Competitors: Companies that solve the same problem as you but with a different solution might bid on your terms to try and poach customers who are in the final stages of their research.
• -> News & Media: If your brand is in the news, media outlets might show up in the paid results.

Relying on a gut feeling about this isn't good enough. You need data. The only place to get the real truth is the Auction Insights report inside your Google Ads account. You need to be looking at this report regularly for your brand campaign. It will tell you exactly who else is appearing in the auctions for your keywords, how often you are appearing above them, and what their impression share is. If that report is completely empty except for you, then great! But I would be very suprised if it was.

Assuming you have no competition leads to complacency. You'll set up a basic campaign and leave it, thinking the job is done. But a brand campaign isn't just a defensive measure; it’s an offensive tool to control your messaging and capture your most valuable, highest-intent audience at the lowest possible cost. Ignoring auction insights is like flying a plane without looking at the radar. You need to know what’s out there.

I'd say you need to rethink your bidding objective...

Now, let's tackle your actual question: Target Impression Share versus Smart Bidding. Tbh, this is a very easy choice. You should almost certainly be using a Smart Bidding strategy.

Target Impression Share does exactly what it says: it tries to get your ad to show a certain percentage of the time, and you can tell it to aim for the absolute top of the page. This sounds good in theory, right? You want to be visible. The problem is, that's ALL it cares about. It does not care about clicks, cost per click, conversions, or the quality of the person seeing the ad. It will happily increase your bids to hit that impression share target, even if it means paying a lot more for a click that doesn't convert.

It’s a vanity metric. It's useful in only one specific scenario: when you are in a head-to-head battle with a direct competitor bidding aggressively on your brand name, and your single most important goal is to ensure you are always, always number one, regardless of cost. Since you believe you don't have this problem, Target Impression Share is the wrong tool for the job. You're just telling Google, "Spend my money to make sure I show up," without giving it any instructions on what a good outcome actually looks like for your business.

Smart Bidding, on the other hand, is all about business outcomes. Strategies like Maximise Conversions, Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), or Target ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) use Google's machine learning to bid for clicks that are most likely to result in a valuable action on your website. The algorithem analyses thousands of signals in real-time for every single search—things like the person's device, location, time of day, browser, past search history—to predict how likely they are to convert. It then adjusts your bid up or down accordingly.

For a brand campaign, where the user intent is already sky-high (they are literally searching for you by name!), Smart Bidding becomes incredibly powerful. It will work to get you the most conversions possible from your most loyal audience, at the most efficient price. Why would you just want to "show up" when you could be actively optimising to get more sales, more leads, or more sign-ups from the traffic you're paying for? It’s a no-brainer.

You probably should focus on what you're actually trying to achieve...

Switching to Smart Bidding is easy, but making it work effectively requires one absolutly critical thing: you MUST have accurate conversion tracking set up. Smart Bidding is only as smart as the data you feed it. If you're not telling it what a "conversion" is, it has nothing to optimise for.

So, before you do anything else, you need to ask: what is the most valuable action someone can take on our website after searching for our brand?

• -> For an eCommerce store: It's a purchase. You should be tracking transaction values to use Target ROAS.
• -> For a B2B/service business: It's a lead form submission, a phone call, or a booked meeting. You should be tracking these as conversions and can then use Maximise Conversions or Target CPA.
• -> For a SaaS company: It's a free trial sign-up or a demo request. Again, perfect for Maximise Conversions or Target CPA.

If you don't have this set up, stop everything and fix it now. Without conversion tracking, you are flying blind and any form of automated bidding is pointless.

Once your tracking is solid, here's the path I'd recommend:

1. Start with Maximise Conversions: This strategy tells Google to get you the most conversions possible within your daily budget. It's the best place to start because it doesn't require you to know your target cost per conversion yet. Let it run for a few weeks to gather data.
2. Analyse the data: After a month or so, look at your average Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). How much did it cost you, on average, to get one conversion from your brand campaign?
3. Switch to Target CPA (if it makes sense): If you have a stable CPA from the "Maximise Conversions" phase and you want more control over costs, you can switch to tCPA. You tell Google the maximum you're willing to pay for a conversion, and it will aim for that average. This helps with budget predictability. If your brand campaign is already very cheap, you might just stick with Maximise Conversions.

For a brand campaign, the cost per conversion should be your lowest across all your Google Ads campaigns. These people are already sold on you; they just need a signpost to the right door. Your job is to make that signpost as efficient and effective as possible. A proper smart bidding setup is the way to do that.

You'll need to think beyond the bid...

Here’s the brutally honest truth: if your brand SERP is uncontested, your bidding strategy is probably the least interesting part of your campaign. It's a solved problem—use Smart Bidding. The real opportunity, the place where you can make a huge difference, is in your ad copy and your use of ad extensions. Your goal shouldn't be to just show up; it should be to create an unmissable, undeniable "brand block" at the top of the page that completely dominates the user's attention and pushes all other results (even your own organic listings) further down.

Your Ad Copy is a Billboard, Not a Business Card.

Most companies write lazy ad copy for their brand campaigns. It's usually just:

[Your Brand Name] | Official Site
Visit the official site for [Your Brand Name]. Shop our latest products and offers online today.

This is a massive wasted oppurtunity. The person searching for you already knows who you are. Use this space to tell them something new, reinforce your value, or direct them to a specific action. Your Responsive Search Ads should be testing headlines and descriptions like:

• -> Promote a Current Offer: "Get 20% Off Your First Order" or "Free Shipping On All UK Orders".
• -> Announce a New Product: "Just Launched: The New 2024 Collection" or "Discover Our New [Feature Name]".
• -> Highlight Key Value Propositions: "Rated 5 Stars on Trustpilot", "UK-Based Customer Support", or "Sustainable & Ethically Made".
• -> Direct to Specific Categories: "Shop Men's", "Shop Women's", "View Our Bestsellers".

You should be constantly rotating and testing your ad copy to keep it fresh and aligned with your overall marketing calendar. It’s your cheapest and most direct line of communication to your hottest audience.

Ad Extensions are Your Superpower.

This is how you truly take over the SERP. You need to be using every single ad extension that is relevant to your business. When you stack them all up, your ad can take up half the screen on a mobile device. This is what you want.

• -> Sitelink Extensions: These are crucial. Add deep links to key pages like 'About Us', 'Contact', 'FAQs', 'Bestsellers', 'New Arrivals', and 'Sale'. Add descriptions to them to make them even bigger.
• -> Callout Extensions: Short, punchy benefits. "Free UK Delivery", "Easy Returns", "24/7 Support", "Secure Checkout".
• -> Structured Snippets: Highlight specific aspects of your products or services. E.g., 'Types: Laptops, Desktops, Tablets' or 'Brands: Brand A, Brand B, Brand C'.
• -> Image Extensions: If you're eligible, these are a game-changer, adding a visual element right next to your text ad.
• -> Promotion Extensions: Perfect for highlighting specific sales or offers, with a little price tag icon that draws the eye.

When you combine great, dynamic ad copy with a full suite of extensions, your ad transforms from a single line of text into a rich, interactive gateway to your brand. This increases your Click-Through Rate (CTR), which in turn improves your Quality Score and can actually lower your Cost Per Click (CPC). You get more traffic for less money, simply by using the tools Google gives you.

Let's quickly run the numbers...

You might be thinking this is all a lot of effort for a simple brand campaign, but the impact is far from small. Your brand campaign should have the highest volume of searches and, with proper optimisation, the highest Click-Through Rate (CTR) of any campaign in your account. A small percentage increase in CTR here can result in thousands more highly qualified visitors to your site every month, often at a lower total cost.

When you improve your ad copy and extensions, your ad becomes more relevant to the user. Google rewards this relevance with a higher Quality Score. A higher Quality Score means you can often pay less per click while maintaining the top position. So, you get more clicks, and you pay less for each one. It's the closest thing to a free lunch in paid advertising.

Use the calculator below to see the potential impact for yourself. Adjust the sliders to reflect your current monthly brand search volume and CTR. Then, see what happens when you increase the CTR by just a few percentage points—a realistic goal from implementing the ad copy and extension advice above.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull all this together, your brand campaign is far more than a simple "set it and forget it" task. It's your most valuable piece of digital real estate. Treating it with the strategic focus it deserves will pay dividends in the form of more traffic, more conversions, and better overall marketing efficiency. Below is a summary of the actionable steps you should take.

As you can probably tell, there's quite a bit to get right here. While the steps I've outlined above are what you need to do, the real value often comes from the experience of having done this hundreds of times. Knowing which levers to pull, how to interpret the data correctly, and how to continuously test and iterate is what separates a decent brand campaign from a truly high-performing one that acts as a solid foundation for all your marketing efforts.

It can often be helpful to get a second set of expert eyes on your account to spot opportunities you might have missed. If you'd like, we offer a completely free, no-obligation consultation where we can go through your account with you and give you some specific, tailored advice.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh