Branded campaigns always look like your best campaigns. Someone searches your brand name, sees your ad, buys. ROAS is enormous, ACoS is tiny, and the report says you are doing something clever.
The uncomfortable question is how many of those people would have bought anyway.
Prefer to watch? One hundred and twelve seconds on why ACoS cannot judge branded spend, how to measure branded market share, and the test that tells you to stop spending.
Why ACoS cannot answer this
Branded search is the warmest traffic on Amazon. The shopper has already decided which brand they want — they are typing your name. Of course they convert.
So a 6% ACoS on branded terms tells you nothing about whether the spend was incremental. Some of those sales are genuinely won by the ad. Some would have arrived through your organic listing seconds later, for free.
Both mistakes are common. Some brands pour budget into terms that would have converted organically. Others under-spend and let competitors intercept shoppers who were explicitly looking for them. The metric that separates the two is not ACoS.
The metric that works: branded market share
Instead of asking "did the ad convert", ask "of everyone searching for my brand, how many bought from me?"
Branded market share = your purchases ÷ total market purchases, across branded search terms.
This is answerable because Amazon publishes it. Search Query Performance reports, per search term, how many purchases happened in total and how many were yours.
How to build it:
1. Get the Brand View Search Query Performance report.
2. Classify the branded terms. Your brand name, common misspellings, abbreviations, and product names unique to you. Misspellings matter — they are often a meaningful share of branded volume.
3. Divide your purchases by total purchases across those terms.
Track it weekly.
One caution about what to watch. The absolute number of branded purchases is not the KPI. As a brand grows, branded searches rise on their own, so the raw number climbs whatever you do with advertising. The share is the signal.
Isolate branded traffic first
This step is not optional, and skipping it makes everything after it unreliable.
Branded terms need to sit in their own exact or phrase campaigns, and be negated from your auto and non-branded campaigns.
Without that separation, "branded spend" is a number you cannot control or even measure — it drifts as your auto campaigns wander onto brand terms, and any test you run reflects changes in campaign mix rather than the change you intended.
With it, branded spend is a dial you can turn.
The test
Once branded traffic is isolated and you have a few weeks of market share history, you can calibrate by experiment rather than argument.
If branded market share is high
You are capturing most of your own demand. Test spending less.
Reduce branded allocation — say from 20% of budget to 10% — and watch market share for a few weeks.
If share holds, the spend was not buying those sales. You have found free margin, and the freed budget can go to acquiring customers who do not yet know you.
If share drops, put it back. You have learned where the floor is, which is exactly what the test is for.
If branded market share is low
Check for real problems first, because advertising cannot fix any of these:
Buy Box suppression — you cannot win a sale you cannot be added to a basket for.
Pricing — if a reseller undercuts you on your own brand term, that is the issue.
Organic visibility on your own brand — if you are not ranking for your own name, something is wrong with indexing or the listing.
Conversion problems on the listing itself.
If none of those apply, test spending more. Raise allocation from 10% to 15–20% and watch.
If share rises meaningfully, the extra spend is genuinely capturing demand that was going elsewhere.
If share barely moves, the constraint is not advertising. More budget will not help, and you should stop and fix the real cause.
That second outcome is the valuable one, because it stops you spending against a problem that advertising was never going to solve.
The principle
The goal is not to maximise branded spend, and not to eliminate it. It is to spend the minimum required to capture the demand your brand has already created, and put everything else toward creating new demand.
Branded advertising defends. It does not grow. The growth comes from the non-branded budget you free up by not over-defending.
For the upper-funnel side of that argument — whether your other advertising is creating branded demand in the first place — see Brand Keywords: Proving Upper-Funnel Spend Works.
Where the data lives
The manual version means downloading Search Query Performance weekly, classifying branded terms by hand in a spreadsheet, and maintaining the history yourself — which is why most brands do this once, if ever, rather than weekly.
In TrackIQ, Search Query Performance is a screen with history already behind it. Your purchases and market purchases sit side by side per term, over a date range that holds, so branded market share is a filter and a calculation rather than a weekly export ritual. See Understanding Search Query Performance and Brand Keywords.
A useful rule of thumb
If branded terms are taking more than about 5% of total ad spend, look closely. That is not automatically wrong — a brand under active attack from competitors may justify more — but it is the level at which the question deserves an answer rather than an assumption.
Related
- Understanding Search Query Performance — the report this method runs on.
- Restructure Your Campaigns Before You Optimise — isolating branded terms into their own campaigns.
- Setting Target TACoS per Product — where freed branded budget should go.
- Tracking Branded Market Share — measuring whether that spend is incremental.