Online ads or brand value: which pays off more?

Many marketers know the moment. The budget has to be split, and the same choice comes up: does it go to Google Ads and social, or to something that is harder to measure but lasts longer? Anyone looking at the dashboard almost always picks the first. Understandable, because it's visible. Only, visible is something other than valuable. And the bill for that choice keeps rising every year.

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An ad only reaches today's buyer

Performance marketing does what it promises: buying attention at the moment someone searches. The click, the lead, the sale, all measurable, all traceable back to a euro. That is the strength, and at the same time the limit.

At any given moment, around five percent of your potential buyers are actively looking for what you offer (LinkedIn B2B Institute). The other ninety-five percent decide later, based on the brand they already know by then. An ad reaches the five percent buying now. Not the rest.

And that bought attention is getting more expensive. Through more competition, privacy rules that limit targeting and algorithms steering towards broad automation, click prices have been rising for years. As soon as the budget stops, the visibility stops. Nothing has been built that stays.

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A brand lowers the price per click

A strong brand lowers the cost of every next campaign. Not because the ad is better, but because people already know who you are before they click. Mental availability, the fact that your name comes to mind the moment the need arises, is one of the strongest growth drivers there is (Ehrenberg-Bass, Byron Sharp).

Picture two organisations running the same Google ad: same keyword, same budget. One has worked for years on awareness and a consistent story. The other only advertises. The first converts better, not because of the ad, but because of the trust that was already there before the click landed. That trust isn't built with a campaign. It grows over time: expressions that resemble one another, a story that returns recognisably, a promise that holds up in practice.

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The dashboards reward what eats your margin

The problem with performance is not that it doesn't work. It's that it's so easy to measure that everything else slips into the background. Last-click attribution, the most used way to assign results, credits the sale to the last ad someone saw. Not to the three brand contacts before it, not to the article that got them thinking six months earlier. Brand building did the groundwork, but appears nowhere in the reporting.

As a result, budget shifts towards what is measurable, not towards what pays off most. And that is exactly where the trap sits. The cost of winning a customer has risen 222 percent in eight years, and the average loss per newly won customer climbed from nine euros in 2013 to around twenty-nine euros in 2025. Organisations that shift their content or SEO budget to paid traffic see their acquisition costs rise within two quarters, because the organic flywheel slows down. Anyone steering only on the dashboard optimises themselves towards a more expensive future.

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Your employer brand buys or attracts too

Organisations that only advertise on job sites buy applicants. Organisations with a strong employer brand attract them. The reason is the same as in customer marketing. A candidate who already knows your name, who knows someone who works there, who read what it's like at your place, needs less convincing. That picture was built long before they clicked apply.

Anyone who only advertises on job sites starts from scratch every time. And pays for that every time too.

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AI shifts the ground under the ads

A shift is coming over this that makes the bill even sharper. A growing share of that ninety-five percent who decide later no longer searches through Google but through an AI. By now more than sixty percent of search interactions have an AI component, and a large share of those searches ends without anyone clicking a link. The AI gives no list of ads and blue links, but one answer with a handful of sources.

That changes what visibility is. An AI chooses the sources it recognises as authoritative, and quotes a brand it once trusts more often. Mental availability shifts along with it: not only whether your name comes to mind for the buyer, but whether the AI names you when the buyer asks. You can't buy your way in there with an ad. You get there with a strong brand and with content worth quoting. We wrote earlier why a content engine is therefore not a writing aid but a findability machine.

The irony: while click prices rise, the share of searches that still ends in a click is shrinking. What you rent gets more expensive and smaller. What you build, a brand that both human and machine recognise, becomes more important instead.

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The ratio sits around sixty-forty

The question is not whether you have to choose between brand and performance. It's how you make them work together. Binet and Field analysed almost a thousand campaigns in the IPA database and found a remarkably stable outcome: for long-term growth, the optimal split sits around sixty percent brand building and forty percent activation. No iron law; it shifts with category and context, in B2B often towards half and half, because the buying cycle is longer and more people decide together. But the direction is consistent, and the gain is large: campaigns that combine brand and performance show on average around ninety percent higher ROI than performance alone.

Brand building lays the foundation, activation harvests the demand that is already there. A strong brand lowers the price per click, raises the conversion on the same ad, shortens the sales cycle and keeps working when the campaign budget runs lower for a while. Many Dutch advertisers flip the ratio the other way, because brand building is harder to justify in a quarterly report. They pay every month again for attention that a strong brand would largely give for free.

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Brand, reach and conversion feed each other

A strong brand is not the opposite of a good campaign. In practice Schwung works with three layers that feed one another, and reach and conversion are emphatically part of that.

The layers reinforce one another. Brand makes reach stick better, reach fills the funnel with the right people, and conversion makes sure those people actually do something. Anyone who optimises only the bottom layer squeezes a funnel that is filled too narrowly at the top.

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What you build counts more than what you rent

Anyone who invests only in ads rents attention. Anyone who also invests in brand builds something that stays theirs. A name people know, a story that holds up, a promise that is kept in practice: you don't build that in one campaign. It takes consistency over time, and the willingness to invest in something that only shows its value over quarters.

So the question at the next budget round is not only what it pays off now, but also what you are building for later. Anyone who asks only the first is in the same situation two years on, and is still paying every month again for the same reach, at a higher price.

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Further reading on schwungreclame.nl

• Online marketing at Schwung: how performance marketing and brand work land together in one plan
• Brand loyalty: why the other 95% of your market sees no ads but still chooses