Brand Campaign Guardrails at Scale
Systematic guardrails allowed brand campaigns to scale profitably while maintaining strong CTR and controlled cost per conversion.
The Challenge
Brand search campaigns had room to grow, but unchecked scaling risked wasted spend on irrelevant queries and cannibalization of other campaigns. The challenge was clear: grow brand volume without losing control over efficiency or letting costs spiral.
Goals
- Scale brand campaign volume while maintaining efficiency
- Prevent wasted spend on irrelevant branded queries
- Establish clear budget boundaries between campaign types
- Create systematic controls for sustainable growth
The Strategy
Approach
We implemented a multi-layered control system that separated brand from non-brand budgets, maintained aggressive negative keyword hygiene, and used impression share targets to guide bid decisions. The result was a framework that allowed confident scaling with clear performance visibility.
Key Tactics
- Separated brand and non-brand budgets to prevent cannibalization
- Maintained weekly negative keyword lists to protect efficiency
- Segmented sitelinks by plan family for relevance
- Set impression share targets to inform bid and rank decisions
- Established weekly pacing reviews with cost/conv checkpoints
The Results
The guardrail framework delivered nearly 200 conversions in October while maintaining strong CTR and controlled cost per conversion, with clear levers for continued scaling.
The Scaling Dilemma
Brand campaigns often look like easy wins—high CTR, strong conversion rates, familiar traffic. But scaling them without controls is a recipe for waste. More budget doesn't always mean more conversions. Sometimes it means paying for irrelevant queries, competing with your own non-brand campaigns, and losing visibility into what's actually working.
The energy client's brand campaigns had headroom to grow. But growth needed to be profitable, controlled, and sustainable. We needed a system, not just a bigger budget.
The Guardrail Framework
We implemented a multi-layered control system built on three pillars: budget separation, negative hygiene, and performance targets.
Budget Separation
Brand and non-brand campaigns got separate budgets with clear boundaries. This prevents two problems:
- Cannibalization: Brand campaigns stealing budget from non-brand efforts
- Attribution confusion: Unable to tell which campaign type is driving results
When brand has its own budget, you can scale it independently and measure its true contribution.
Weekly Negative Hygiene
Negative keyword lists weren't a one-time setup—they were a weekly maintenance task. Every week, we reviewed search terms and expanded negatives to protect efficiency.
This matters because Google's matching is generous. Without active maintenance, brand campaigns capture queries that look branded but aren't relevant—misspellings that mean something else, competitor + your brand queries, and tangential searches that won't convert.
Impression Share Targets
We set impression share targets and used them as forward-looking indicators. If share dropped, we investigated before costs spiked. If share was maxed, we knew budget increases would find new volume rather than paying more for the same traffic.
Impression share tells you where you stand in the auction. It's the metric that explains why your other metrics look the way they do.
Sitelink Strategy
Generic sitelinks underperform. We segmented sitelinks by plan family, so searchers saw relevant options immediately:
- Solar buyback sitelinks for solar-related brand queries
- Standard plan sitelinks for general brand searches
- Support sitelinks for service-related branded searches
This improved both CTR and conversion rate. When users see relevant sitelinks, they click with intent—and they land on pages that match that intent.
Weekly Pacing and Checkpoints
Budget scaling wasn't a set-it-and-forget-it operation. We established weekly pacing reviews with specific checkpoints:
- Cost/conv tracking: Is efficiency holding as we scale?
- Impression share: Are we winning the auctions we should?
- Conversion volume: Is more budget yielding more results?
- Query quality: Are we still capturing relevant searches?
A bad week is recoverable. A bad month—where problems compound unchecked—is expensive. Weekly reviews catch issues before they become trends.
The Results
October delivered 195.8 conversions at $151.39 cost per conversion with 16.48% CTR. These numbers aren't just strong in isolation—they represent controlled performance at scale.
More importantly, the framework provided clear next steps:
- Budget increases with weekly cost/conv monitoring
- Impression share expansion in specific query categories
- Continued negative expansion as new query patterns emerged
The Bottom Line
Scaling brand campaigns isn't about throwing more money at them. It's about building systems that allow confident growth with clear performance visibility.
The guardrail framework—budget separation, weekly negative hygiene, impression share targets, and regular pacing reviews—transformed brand from a "set and hope" campaign to a controlled growth lever with predictable results.
Key Insights
- Brand campaigns can scale, but without guardrails they become a bucket for wasted spend. Weekly negative maintenance is essential, not optional.
- Budget separation between brand and non-brand prevents the campaigns from competing with each other and makes performance attribution clear.
- Impression share targets provide a forward-looking metric—if you're not winning the share you want, adjust before costs spike.
- Sitelink segmentation by plan family improves relevance and conversion rates. Generic sitelinks underperform targeted ones.
- Weekly pacing reviews with cost/conv checkpoints catch problems before they compound. A bad week is recoverable; a bad month isn't.
