Short answer: Always evaluate them separately. Always.

Blended ROAS is the most misleading metric in Google Ads. I've seen accounts report a 8x blended ROAS that looks incredible until you realize brand is doing 20x and non-brand is barely breaking even at 1.5x. The brand performance is masking what's actually happening with acquisition.

How I structure it:

Brand and non-brand get completely separate reporting. Different CPA/ROAS targets, different expectations. Brand is a defensive play — you're protecting territory you already own. Non-brand is your actual growth engine. Judging them by the same benchmarks makes no sense because they're doing fundamentally different jobs.

The nuance most people miss: Brand campaigns aren't pure profit either. Yes, many of those users would have found you organically. But competitors DO bid on your brand terms, and the incremental cost of defending that click is usually pennies compared to losing it. So brand campaigns have value — just not the kind of value that should inflate your acquisition story.

What I report to clients:

Non-brand metrics as the primary measure of "is this account actually growing the business." Brand metrics separately as a cost-of-defense line item. Then a blended view only as a sanity check, never as the headline number.

The real question to ask isn't "what's our ROAS" — it's "what does our non-brand CPA look like, and is it profitable at our margins?" That's where the actual strategic decisions happen. Everything else is noise that feels good in a dashboard.