Bidding on your brand terms as part of your PPC strategy can be a highly debated topic. While many companies see big success by bidding on their brand, common PPC questions often asked by companies include ‘why should I be bidding on my own brand name when I am already ranking number 1 organically?‘ or ‘why should I be bidding on my own brand name when these users already know who we are?‘. While these are good questions to ask, ranking number 1 organically or users knowing who you are doesn’t necessarily lead to high conversion numbers.

So should you be bidding on your brand name? The short answer is yes.

What is Brand Name Bidding?

Before I continue, what do I mean by brand name bidding? Brand name bidding is simply when you target your own brand name as a keyword as part of your PPC strategy, so that your ad appears in the search results when a user searches for your brand.

5 Reasons Why You Should Be Bidding On Your Brand Terms

1. Cheaper CPCs
Branded terms are often a lot cheaper than non-branded keywords. This is due to, in part, lower competition around your branded keywords (although lower competition does not necessarily mean no competition – we will touch on this below). Not only that, branded keywords often see the highest CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience, and thus, higher quality score. And high quality scores lead to lower CPCs.
This means that you don’t have to spend a lot of money in order to dominate your brand SERP. So why would you not pay for high-quality clicks with cheaper CPCs?

2. Keep Your Competitors At Bay
Although some people might view this as unethical, competitors will sometimes bid against your brand, in an attempt to steal your customers and clicks – and this can be a perfectly valid PPC strategy. Therefore, bidding on your branded terms can be as simple as to avoid losing clicks to your competitors. Your competitor’s paid ads will appear above your organic listings, and if you don’t bid on your brand, you are losing that top position to your competitor. And losing that top position can see users who were searching for your brand, being diverted to your competitor’s website. You are essentially making it easier (and cheaper) for your competitors to steal your customers.
Bidding on your brand name, means you are not only owning the top position, but you are also making your competitor’s clicks more expensive, as they will have to increase their bid in order to outrank you.
Sometimes bidding on your brand, can be seen more as a defensive strategy, but it is a defensive strategy that is effective.

3. You Have Greater Control
Bidding for your brand name means you have greater control over the appearance of the ad, and the experience of the user.
For starters, you have control over the messaging of your ads, and have the ability to change your messaging, whenever you need. You can also send users to a particular landing page, rather than sending users straight to the homepage.
Say, for example, you are running a promotion, and would like to update your ad copy to promote this, and send visitors to a specific landing page for the promotion. While this is hard to achieve organically, you have full control over this with paid search ads.
Alternatively, you also have the ability to include a specific call-to-action or direct users to particular pages that are important to your business through the use of sitelinks.
Brand name bidding means you can create the story you want to tell users about your brand when they search for you.

4. Providing Additional Information For Users
Google Ads provides advertisers the ability to provide additional information to users through the use of customisable ad extensions, which is not available in your organic listings. These can include structured snippet extensions, callout extensions, promotion extensions, location extensions and price extensions.
In order to maximise performance of your ads, Google will select the extensions that are most relevant to each user, and provides greater visibility and prominence of your ad on the search results page.

5. Increase Brand Exposure On The Search Results Page
Bidding on your brand terms allows you to dominate the top of the search results page by showing more listings and taking up more real estate (by showing up in both the paid and organic search results). Having both paid ads and organic listings means the user has more opportunity to click through to your website. Users might not make it to your organic listing if they find what they’re looking for in the ads at the top of the page, so showing first in the ads can be crucial.
Two is better than one, right?

Bidding on your brand terms is a great PPC strategy, in order to make sure your ads appear at the top of the page, gives you greater control over the messaging, and to protect against any potential competitors activity, at a lower cost.
However, it is important to set up the brand keywords within it’s own dedicated brand campaign, in order to segment them from non-branded terms. This allows you to control spend, measure performance and optimise for your KPIs.

Looking for help developing your digital marketing strategy? Get in touch with Bliss for a consultation and hear how we can help your business grow!