Brand terms perform differently than non-brand terms. Although the strength of the brand name and how general the name is will have an affect, usually, your brand terms will cost the least (per click), will convert the best and will provide the most volume.
Craig Danuloff, from Click Equations, has a post providing guidance as to how to go about separating your brand terms from the rest of your account. He hit the nail on the head when he mentions that some people will be shocked at how little cost is being spent on pure brand terms and how little volume and efficiency is coming from the non-brand terms.
I was managing the account for a major airline and saw this exact thing happen when I first started working on the account. The account had hundreds of thousands of keywords and was therefore a bit more difficult to keep organized. Furthermore, the brand terms had a daily cap set on them per request from the client (that is a different story).
When I first was transitioning the account, I started off by conducting initial housekeeping to see what changes should be made. As I was analyzing the account, I saw that some of the best performing non-brand terms were actually being mapped to brand terms. The first problem with this is that it went against what the client wanted (only a certain amount per day being spent on brand terms) and the other problem was that from an optimization standpoint, the data we were seeing wasn’t providing an true picture of some of the keywords.
After making changes to the account, we quickly saw that these “high volume” non-brand terms in fact didn’t provide much volume and were quite inefficient. Therefore, in order to make sure you’re managing the account to peak efficiency, separating brand terms from non-brand terms is crucial.
Added tip: For Google, use the Search Query report to help see if your keywords are being mapped to words they shouldn’t be mapping to.
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