How we cut a brand’s CPC by 3-10x

Over 3 weeks ago, I flew to Singapore to speak at eCom North, one of the top conferences for eCom brands.

In my session, I shared 4 advanced strategies we use to scale brands past $10M on Google.

These are the core pillars that generate the highest impact on our results.

Without them, scaling past 8 figures would be nearly impossible. I thought I’d share one of the points with you guys here today.

The first topic that I covered (and the most important one) was:

Branded vs. Non-brand separation

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about this a lot.

There's a good reason for that.

I’ve watched almost every brand mess this up, including the ones doing 8, 9 figures per year.

This brand, for example, was running PMax with a ton of branded terms mixed in.

Because of that, they were paying up to AU$15 per click

After we rebuilt their account structure and isolated branded terms into dedicated campaigns…

Their branded CPC dropped to AU$0.18 on average.

In other words:

They were spending 3-10x more than necessary just to buy their own traffic.

They never noticed because the ROAS looked “pretty good” on the surface.

But they were burning money simply because the account wasn’t built properly.

To fix this, you need 3 things working together.

1. Structure

First, you need dedicated branded Search and Shopping campaigns.

For branded search, target every version of your brand keywords:

• Exact brand name

• Brand + product name

• Common misspellings

• Proprietary product name

• Other variations that converted in PMax campaigns.

For branded Shopping, set priority to Low and apply brand negative keyword lists to your PMax/Non-brand Shopping campaigns.

This way, your ads get served to prospecting campaigns first while excluding the brand name…

And your brand campaigns can then capture all the brand variations.

2. Bidding

For branded campaigns, you should always stick with manual bidding.

This gives you full control over what you're willing to spend.

Set low bids while maintaining at least 85% of your impression share.

Your branded terms shouldn’t exceed $0.30-$0.40.

If you have multiple competitors bidding on your brand terms, you might see this go up to $1-2.

But anything beyond that means something is wrong with your setup.

3. Optimization & Monitoring

This is arguably the most important part of the entire process.

As you start scaling, new search terms will emerge that don't align with your campaign goals

Set up a weekly schedule to:

• Filter brand terms in prospecting campaigns

• Filter generic terms in brand campaigns

On top of that…

There’s a high chance more brands will bid on your keywords as you grow.

So you’ll want to set up an automation that alerts you whenever your search impression share drops below 80%.

This keeps you in the top positions and prevents competitors from stealing your traffic.

Now, this framework should give you a solid understanding of how to approach this.

My advice to you?

Audit your setup for capturing branded traffic asap.

It’s very likely that you're either targeting branded traffic in PMax and prospecting campaigns…

Or you're overpaying for branded terms. Probably both if I'm being honest.

Branded traffic is the easiest money you’ll ever make on Google.

Which is exactly why you can still see a crazy ROAS even when you have a sloppy setup…

… even when you’re paying 3-10x more than you’re supposed to.

But what I've realized over the years is:

As you scale and your cost rises, every dollar of profit matters.

And as you get bigger, you'll have more brands watching you, bidding on your keywords, and looking to take a piece of your traffic.

But if you have a solid setup and monitoring system from day 1, none of that will shake you.

Don't wait until you've already lost money to address this.

Jackson

Founder and CEO of Echelonn.

How we can help:

Get a free Google ads audit: For brands spending more than $20k/mo. or making over 1 million annually, we’ll identify the key bottlenecks in your account, and turn it into a free 90-day scaling plan. Click here.

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