Free tool
Brand vs non-brand splitter: what the blended number hides
Paste a Google Ads export. You'll get brand and non-brand performance separated, side by side with the blended figure that was carrying both. Free, it runs in your browser, nothing's uploaded, and it'll sometimes tell you the blended number was fine.
If your monthly report carries one blended return figure, this is the cut it's missing. A single number can be arithmetically correct and still point you the wrong way, because it lets demand you already owned pay for acquisition that isn't working.
1 · Your brand
This is the only judgment the tool can't make for you. It builds the spacing, domain and misspelling variants from your name, and you correct the list. Nothing is sent anywhere.
2 · Paste the export
Copy the rows out of a Google Ads report, or open a downloaded CSV and copy from there. Search terms beat campaign names, because a campaign name is a label applied by whoever built the account. Include the header row. It reads your columns and shows you which ones it matched.
Made-up sample. Not a real account, not a copy of anyone's export, and the column names are our invention: yours will differ, which is why the tool shows you which of your columns it matched.
Where this comes from
It's the first cut we make on any paid account we inherit, published in full rather than kept as a sales tool. The article behind it carries the rest of the method: why reported brand return overstates what paid search contributed, what the first two weeks on an account should look like, and where we refuse to compete. Before any of that, the nine-gate viability check decides whether the channel is a fit at all. For the same split on the organic side, the branded regex generator builds the Search Console filter that separates the two there. Same distinction, different channel, and it uses the same brand patterns this page does.
Run it on a report we sent, too. We hold SEO and paid for some clients, and that makes the conflict worse rather than better: our SEO work raises branded searches, our brand campaign converts them, and we'd be getting paid for capturing demand we'd be claiming to create. Two line items, one customer, who was already coming. Reporting brand separately in month one is how we stop ourselves, and it's the same check to run on us.
Paid media sits beside the organic work as the demand-capture layer, at published prices, including the part where a spend cut we recommend doesn't reduce our fee mid-quarter.
FAQ
- What is branded search in Google Ads?
- Branded search is any query containing your company name, your domain, or a close variant of either. Someone typing your name already knows who you are. Non-brand search is everything else: people describing a problem or a product rather than a company. The distinction decides what a report means, because a branded click captures demand that already exists, while a non-brand click is the only one that found you somebody who wasn't already looking.
- What counts as a branded keyword?
- Your company name, its spacing and hyphenation variants, your domain with and without the extension, likely misspellings, and any nickname or product name customers use as shorthand for you. The edge cases are the ones to decide deliberately: a company name made of ordinary words, a product line other retailers also sell, and competitor names, which behave like brand terms in a pattern and like non-brand demand in reality.
- How do I separate branded and non-branded performance in Google Ads?
- Export your campaigns or, better, your search terms, classify every row by whether the term carries your brand, and total the two groups separately. That is what this tool does in your browser: you paste the export, check the brand variants it built, correct anything it got wrong, and read spend, clicks, conversions and return for each half side by side. A search-term export gets you closer to the searcher than a campaign name does, because a campaign name is a label somebody applied rather than something a customer typed.
- Should I turn off my brand campaign?
- Not on the strength of this split alone. There are real reasons to keep bidding on your own name: competitors bidding on it, controlling the message on the result page, promoting a specific offer, and cases where the ad genuinely adds clicks. The test is a controlled holdout: reduce or pause brand spend by geography, audience or time period and watch total conversions rather than Google Ads conversions. If total conversions barely move, the campaign was collecting customers who were already arriving.
- Is my Google Ads data uploaded anywhere?
- No. What you paste is read in your browser, nothing is sent to us or to anyone else, there is no signup, and closing the tab ends it. Copy the summary out if you want to keep it.