Search Non-Brand: The Ecom Ad Strategy Gap

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]So many e-commerce advertisers miss out on this. They hear that Google is all about shopping and then that's all they do. Most e-commerce brands where I audit their account aren't even doing search non-brands and that's a huge missed opportunity. Like for my clients at BigFlare, we build out search non-brands for all of them and then I'd say typically we get about a 70/30 split between shopping and search. Meaning that if you're making 100k revenue, about 70k of that is coming from shopping, 30k of that is coming from search. And then if you don't do any search non- brands, if you don't do any search on top of your shopping, you just miss out on that 30. You would just be doing 70k revenue, whereas if you added search non-brands and added search campaigns, you would make an extra 30k on top. It's incremental revenue that you're not getting if you're only doing shopping, right? Generally speaking, when we build out search non-brands campaigns or build out full search campaigns brand and non-brand, what we see is a ROAS that's about 100% to 200% higher blended ROAS that's about 100% to 200% higher than in shopping. So if shopping is getting like 400% ROAS, we build out the search campaigns and it gets smaller volume, but we typically see it's going to get a 500% ROAS. So it's it's profitable volume when you do this properly. [music] And if you're not doing it, you're like missing out on maybe 30% of revenue from Google Ads that you could be getting. So how to do it? Just quickly speaking, use the search terms from your Performance Max or Shopping campaign. Go into the search terms report, dig out the high performing search terms, the things that have converted, the things that are getting good CTR, the things that are getting lots of impressions and clicks.

[00:01:33]And start there as a place to start bidding on search non-brands. Use those keywords as your starter keywords in a search non-brand campaign.

[00:01:42]>> [music] >> Expand on those keywords with Keyword Planner, so take the best keywords, put them into Google's Keyword Planner, do some keyword research and find more relevant good quality looking keywords that you can advertise as well and expand on your initial list. Make sure you have single themed [music] ad groups. Don't lump all your keywords into one big ad group, but at the same time, don't just do one ad group per keyword. The best compromise these days is in between single themed ad group.

[00:02:08]So, every ad group it can have a bunch of keywords in there. You can have 10, 20, 30 keywords in one ad group as long as it's all the same theme. And then you want to write ad copy that speaks to that specific theme. And then the other big tripping point that a lot of people fall on is you need at least like a 3-month testing budget. It's usually not going to be profitable in month one. It might take 1 or 2 months of testing before you get to profitability and then the third month is when you can start to scale it. But if you go into such on brands thinking I have to be profitable in a week or a day or a month, then it's probably not going to work for you and you need to have budget and patience for testing.