Branded PPC is the hardest spend in the account to justify, because the counterfactual is invisible. **If you stop bidding on your own brand name, do you lose those sales — or would they have come anyway?**

**Branded market share is the metric that answers it**, and the answer only appears as a trend, not as a snapshot.

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-brandshare-explainer-4352d151.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? One hundred and fifty-six seconds on defining brand terms correctly, building four weeks of baseline, and testing branded spend against the share trend.*

## **What branded market share means here**

**Of all the purchases made on search terms containing your brand, what share went to you?**

**If it sits near 100%, you already own that traffic** — and paying for it may be buying sales you would have had for free.

**If it drops when you reduce branded spend, the spend was defending something real.**

**That is the feedback loop.** Without it, branded budget is argued about rather than decided.

## **Step 1: define what counts as branded**

**List the brand terms — your brand name and its common misspellings. Nothing else.**

**Do not list product phrases.** If your brand is *Northwind*, you list `northwind`. You do not list *northwind blanket*, *northwind sheets*, or any other product-modified variant.

**Because the rule is containment:** any search term containing your brand token is flagged as branded, and the modified phrases are caught automatically. Listing them separately only creates gaps and double-counting.

**Add misspellings**, which are common in branded search and easy to miss.

**Set this up once**, and revisit it only when the brand itself changes.

## **Step 2: pull the branded view weekly**

**Brand Analytics → Search Query Performance → Brand view, weekly.**

**Weekly, not monthly.** The whole point is to see a trend responding to a change you made, and a monthly cadence gives you four data points a year.

**Every week, you want the same three things:**

**Top branded search terms and their purchases.**

**Top non-branded terms and their purchases.**

**Branded versus non-branded totals**, in both absolute and percentage terms.

![Branded and non-branded queries, week by week](/kb-assets/shot-b28-brandterms-view-a83aae.png)

**Classifying every query as branded or non-branded and tracking the split week over week is the entire measurement** — see [**Generic, Branded and Competitor Terms**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/generic-branded-and-competitor-terms) and [**Understanding Search Query Performance**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/understanding-search-query-performance). The manual version is a fresh export, a fresh sheet tab and a manual paste every single week — which is exactly the kind of task that gets done for six weeks and then quietly stops.

## **Step 3: establish a baseline before changing anything**

**Four weeks minimum, with branded spend unchanged.**

**One week tells you nothing.** You need to know what normal variation looks like before you can recognise a response.

**Most established brands sit somewhere between 80% and 100%** on branded market share. **Where you sit is less important than how stable it is.**

## **Step 4: then test**

**Change branded spend deliberately, and watch the chart.**

### **If your branded share is already very high**

**Reduce branded PPC spend and watch.**

**Share stays flat → the spend was buying sales you were getting anyway.** Move that budget to non-branded terms, where it buys incremental customers.

**Share falls → the spend was defending real ground.** Put it back.

### **If your branded share is lower than you expected**

**Someone else is converting your brand searches** — usually competitors bidding on your name.

**Then branded spend is genuinely defensive**, and the question becomes how much it takes to hold the position rather than whether to spend at all. See [**How Much to Spend on Branded Keywords**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/how-much-to-spend-on-branded-keywords).

## **Read it as a trend, not a number**

**Change one thing at a time**, or you cannot attribute the movement.

**Give each test three or four weeks.** Branded search volume is seasonal and lumpy; a single week's dip is usually noise.

**And watch non-branded purchases at the same time.** Branded share rising while total non-branded purchases fall is not a win — it usually means you have simply got smaller.

## **Why this is worth the effort**

**Branded terms convert extremely well**, which makes branded campaigns look excellent on ACOS and makes them very easy to over-fund.

**A campaign with a 5% ACOS is not automatically a good campaign.** If those buyers were coming anyway, its true incremental ACOS is infinite.

**This tracker is the only practical way to find out** — see [**Profit Campaigns and Ranking Campaigns**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/profit-campaigns-and-ranking-campaigns).

## **Common mistakes**

**Listing product phrases as brand terms**, which breaks the classification.

**Forgetting misspellings**, and under-counting branded traffic.

**Judging on one week**, before a baseline exists.

**Changing branded spend and something else at the same time.**

**Reading branded share alone**, without watching non-branded purchases beside it.

**Assuming a low branded ACOS proves the spend is working.**

## **Related**

- [**How Much to Spend on Branded Keywords**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/how-much-to-spend-on-branded-keywords) — the decision this measurement informs.
- [**Generic, Branded and Competitor Terms**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/generic-branded-and-competitor-terms) — the classification underneath it.
- [**Understanding Search Query Performance**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/understanding-search-query-performance) — the report this all runs on.