For the brands we work with, 80-95% of spend goes toward prospecting. We keep branded campaigns lean and efficient, then push every available dollar toward finding new customers.
Here's the pattern we see over and over:
A brand comes to us spending $20K, $30K, maybe $50K per month. Growth has stalled. They've tried increasing budgets, but ROAS tanks when they do.
We audit the account and find the same issue every time:
60-80% of their conversions are branded traffic.
They're paying $3-$10 per click for people searching their brand name. Meanwhile, prospecting campaigns are either nonexistent, underfunded, or tangled up with branded queries.
The problem with a “branded-focus account” is that branded search volume is a fixed ceiling. You can't grow beyond your brand awareness.
If 20,000 people search your brand name each month, that's your maximum reach.
You can optimize conversion rate, improve landing pages, reduce CPCs… but you are always limited by how much demand you generate from other platforms.
The only way to scale exponentially is to reach more people.
With prospecting, your addressable market isn't "people who know your brand." It's "everyone with the problem your product solves."
That could be 10x, 50x, or 100x larger than your branded search volume.
We've scaled clients from $500K to multi-million dollar months on Google Ads by focusing relentlessly on prospecting while keeping branded campaigns efficient at $0.30 CPCs.
The formula is: