Your blended cost per lead is an average of two very different numbers.

Why the two percentages are almost never the same

Brand terms are cheap to buy and convert at very high rates, because the person searching has already decided to look you up. So brand tends to take a small slice of spend and return a large slice of conversions. That asymmetry is exactly what makes the blended number misleading: the cheap conversions pull the average down and the expensive ones disappear into it.

None of which means brand spend is waste. Competitors bid on your name, and defending it is usually worth doing. It means brand and non-brand are two different purchases that should be measured, targeted and budgeted separately — and in most accounts they are sitting in the same campaign with one target, being judged by one number that describes neither.

Where to find these four numbers

1. Spend and conversions — Campaigns view, last full month, search campaigns plus Performance Max.
2. Brand’s share — if you already have separate brand campaigns, read it straight off. If you don’t, go to the Search terms report, add a filter for search terms containing your company name, and compare the cost and conversions of those rows against the total.
3. Watch Performance Max. Pmax does not report search terms in the same way, and it very often absorbs brand queries. If Pmax is your cheapest campaign by some distance, assume a good share of what it is claiming is brand and set your brand share higher.
4. Round freely. This is a shape, not an audit. Getting the brand share within ten points is enough to see whether you have a problem.

If the multiple is large

The number to act on is not the blended figure and not the brand figure — it is the non-brand one, because that is the true price of every new customer who did not already know you. Once you can see it, three things usually follow: brand and non-brand get split into separate campaigns with separate targets, Performance Max gets checked for what it is really claiming, and qualified-pipeline data starts getting sent back into Google so bidding optimises toward revenue instead of form fills.