I used to advise Target Impression Share or Manual CPC on brand terms, and to only run brand campaigns at all if competitors were bidding against you. A recent change in how Google Ads evaluates conversions has made that advice incomplete.
Why the old advice made sense at the time
Brand clicks are usually cheap and convert well, so spending real budget defending a term nobody else was bidding on felt like burning cash for no reason. Target Impression Share protected visibility without overspending, and Manual CPC gave tight control when you needed it. That logic held up fine — right up until account-level learning changed what those brand conversions were actually worth.
What actually changed
Google Ads now draws on a conversion pool at the account level, not just within each campaign. If your brand campaign runs on manual bidding, though, those conversions can get excluded from that broader signal entirely. Smart bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions, on the other hand, feed straight into it — which means cheap, reliable brand conversions can actually help the algorithm learn what a good conversion looks like across your whole account.
What testing this actually showed
Switching branded campaigns to smart bidding across several accounts, we saw nonbrand performance improve fairly quickly. In one account, we turned it back off as a test — nonbrand performance dropped within a month. That’s a strong enough pattern across accounts to take seriously, though if your brand traffic is noisy or low quality to begin with, the effect may not hold the same way.
When it’s worth trying
If branded search is producing cheap, reliable conversions, smart bidding is worth testing even with zero competitor bidding — the value isn’t about defending the term, it’s about the learning signal it feeds the rest of the account. Keep an eye on conversion quality as you go, and back off if brand traffic costs start climbing for no good reason.
How to run the test properly
Switch the brand campaign to Maximize Conversions or Target CPA, then watch nonbrand CPA and conversion volume specifically — that’s where the effect shows up, not in the brand campaign itself. Give the account two to four weeks to actually learn before judging the results, then compare before and after to decide whether it’s worth keeping.
Where to read more on the mechanics
Google’s smart bidding documentation covers the strategies directly, their conversion measurement guide explains how attribution actually works underneath, and Search Engine Journal has useful broader context on bidding strategy shifts.
Related reading on this blog:
- Scale Ads by Incremental Attribution
- 7 Skills That Replaced Our Ads Workflow
- Facebook Ads Limits That Kill Performance
- High-Converting Google Ad Anatomy
- Free Claude Skills for Paid Ads
The nuance is worth sitting with: branded search on smart bidding is defensible now in a way it wasn’t a couple of years ago, precisely because it can teach the rest of your account cheaply. Run a controlled test before rolling this out everywhere — that’s the only way to know if your account actually benefits from the change.