Overview

In the third quarter of 2023, Merkle’s analysis showed that brand‑related search terms accounted for roughly two‑thirds of Sponsored Brands revenue and over forty percent of Sponsored Products revenue on Amazon. Because the bulk of paid‑media earnings stem from shoppers who already know a brand, Amazon sellers who fail to isolate those keywords risk mixing high‑performing defensive bids with costly competitor targeting. Splitting branded search into dedicated defensive and competitive campaigns gives sellers the data clarity and budget discipline needed to protect their trademark while testing the upside of capturing rival‑brand traffic.

Key Points

• Brand‑keyword share — Merkle reported that 62 % of Sponsored Brands sales and 42 % of Sponsored Products sales were driven by queries containing the seller’s own brand name or close variations.
• Two spend categories — Branded search can be divided into defensive spend, which shields the seller’s trademark, and competitive spend, which aims at rival brand names or closely related generic terms.
• Transparent performance metrics — When defensive and competitive keywords run in separate campaigns, each side’s ACoS, ROAS, impression share and CTR become visible without the other side’s data diluting the picture.
• Granular budget allocation — Separate campaigns enable sellers to assign a larger daily budget to defensive protection while allocating a smaller, test‑focused budget to competitor targeting, preventing one side from exhausting the other’s funds.
• Tailored bidding strategies — With isolated ad groups, sellers can raise bids on high‑value defensive terms to dominate prime placement, and simultaneously experiment with more aggressive or dynamic bids on competitor terms without risking cross‑campaign bid interference.
• Risk mitigation — By keeping defensive spend distinct, sellers reduce the chance that a sudden spike in competitor‑keyword costs will unintentionally lower visibility for their own brand‑search ads.

How Splitting Out Branded Search Works

1. Set up a Defensive Campaign — Launch a Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Products campaign that contains only the seller’s registered trademark and its common misspellings or suffixes (for example, “EcoGear water bottle”, “EcoGear bottle 32 oz”, and “EcoGear water‑bottle”). In practice, an EcoGear vendor might assign a $0.80 cost‑per‑click to the exact‑match “EcoGear water bottle” keyword, ensuring the ad appears in the top slot whenever a shopper types the brand name, thereby capturing the high‑intent traffic that is most likely to convert.