Brand in Title Tag - a Ranking Factor for Scaling Big Websites?

[Blenny]

I'm in the middle of redesigning title tags on a large ecommerce site - approximately 9000 product pages.

The old structure was -(product name/description) | (Website/Brand)

So an example would be -

Big League Chew - 13 oz. | Target       - With 'Target' Being the site's brand and appearing on each.

With Google's new Title Tag display, our title tags are too long now. Unfortunately, our Brand/Website is HUGE - over 18 characters. My question is two fold -

1. Is it OK to remove brand from the title tags of some particularly long names? Will this impact ranking?

2. Does Google look for brand in these title tags, and more specifically: brand consistency in title tags?

I'd love to cut the brand out of some as the product name is the biggest click-through element by far - but I don't want to affect rankings. My 'gut' says that I should focus on clickthrough rate with title tags and cut brand where necessary. Does anyone have thoughts on this?

[FCBM]

I don't have a scientific answer but I do have one based off personal experience and knowledge.

1. The page title is used for ranking purposes and having a brand appended to every title tag actually results in page titles where Google decides to display the brand first and then the keywords which often times get cut off. So your title can be Bubble Gum 72 oz | Target and Google can/does display it as Target : Bubble Gum 72 oz, now imagine the same scenario with a longer brand name and all the sudden Google is cutting off the keywords/ click worthy title.

2. I think that unless you're a very dominate player in a certain industry your brand name doesn't help, even with that said smaller less "authoritative" brands can out rank older brand by just being a better player in the internet marketing game. Consider your audience, is the brand making them click the page because every other brand is spammy/crap or is the brand not adding value?

I expect that you'll get very similar answers to mine from other here. What I would recommend is removing the brand from the title on decent traffic page (not your best but not your worst) and run a test, see if the brand in title does anything.

Lastly, if you need to have the brand and it's causing issues just throw it into the meta description.

[Blenny]

Thanks FCBM!

I hadn't considered the reformatting Google tends to do anyway.At this point, I haven't seen any where this is the case 'in the wild' for our brand (maybe they've recognized that it doesn't affect the clickthrough on our stuff?). They simply just let it cut off since they're mostly over the 55 or so limit.

I think a test is in order as well. Thanks!