Money spent bidding on sponsored ads for your own brand name (branded keywords) is largely non-incremental: it captures shoppers who searched your brand directly and would likely have bought organically anyway, rather than pulling in net-new buyers.
Non-branded, category/ingredient terms (e.g., "ginger candy") expand reach to buyers who don't yet know the brand — ad spend there is incremental in a way branded spend is not.
Raised while auditing Essential Candy's ad spend allocation as a reason to redirect budget away from defending brand-name searches and toward non-branded discovery terms and Switchers Tactic (Product Targeting by Competitor Star-Rating Gap).
"Problem with that is it's not incremental."
In a live brand audit, a large share of an agency's PPC budget was going to the brand's own branded keyword (e.g., 'Essential Candy') — spend that isn't incremental because that traffic would likely convert organically or via brand recognition regardless of the ad. Mentors treated this, alongside broad-auto spend on unwinnable head terms, as one of the two structural leaks keeping ad spend inefficient. See Auto Campaign as ~10%-of-Budget Keyword-Harvesting Cap.
'Problem with that is it's not incremental' — bidding on the brand's own name only reaches searchers who were already going to find the brand organically. The alternative is symptom- or ingredient-based long-tail terms (e.g., 'nausea,' 'ginger candy' for a ginger-candy brand) that can pull in shoppers who didn't already know the brand. See "Right to Win" Keyword Selection Framework.