Are my branded search conversions actually incremental?

Most of them probably aren't. When people actually test branded search with incrementality methods, somewhere between 70 to 90% of those conversions turn out to be non-incremental-meaning they'd have happened without the ad.

Here's why: branded search targets people who already know who you are. They typed your company name into Google. They were coming to find you anyway. You're paying to put an ad in front of demand you already created, then paying again when they convert. Attribution can't see this gap because it only ever sees the conversions that happened, never the counterfactual-the ones that would have happened without the ad.

A concrete example: a campaign reporting 4x return can sit far below that once you strip out the sales coming regardless. When you run an actual test-a geo holdout where you turn the channel off in matched regions and measure the difference-the real incremental return often tells a completely different story.

The only way to know for your specific brand is to test it. A geo holdout is the simplest version: pick comparable cities, turn branded search off in half of them for a few weeks, keep it running in the other half, and read the gap.