We’re often left surprised when we analyse a PPC account and find that there is no current or historical data on any brand terms. Whilst we tend to recommend it for a lot of clients though, it’s not for everyone.
So let’s break down both the positives and the negatives of bidding on your own brand terms, starting with the positives.
Brand domination
One of the main reasons why you should be bidding on your own brand terms is because it helps you to dominate your brand name. Whilst you may already rank No.1 organically for your company name, some competitors can piggyback off your brand name to encourage people away through their own PPC listing and therefore, they may click on your competition rather than your website.
By dominating your brand, it gives you authority when someone searches but it also means your competition won’t take traffic from you.
Give your business authority when someone searches
As touched on above, showing as the top pay per click advert when someone searches for your brand means that you gain authority. If your competitors do happen to target your brand terms, it shows intent when your advert is No.1.
People are getting lazier when they’re using the internet and their mobile devices so if you have an advert at the top of Google, it offers convenience. Authority and convenience go a long way in customer satisfaction.
Low cost and low risk
Another reason to bid on your brand terms is it is low cost and low risk to your business. You don’t need to invest a huge amount of advertising spend to your own brand terms in order to show them and some people might not click on them anyway. As the search volumes are likely to be lower than many of your non-brand keywords, the average cost per click is probably quite low too.
With it being low cost but high in quality, it helps your whole account achieve a better Quality Score and could in fact mean your non-brand keywords could be slightly cheaper too.
You can send visitors to pages you’re keen for them to see
Adding Sitelink Extensions to your adverts means you can add CTA’s and important pages as link below your main advert and can therefore direct your audience to specific pages of interest. These pages could be some crucial content about a product or it could be a voucher code, for example.
By doing this you’re able to test new landing pages and understand how the user interacts with specific content, as well as having the ability to regular change the pages that show here.
And now we will highlight the reasons why you might not want to bid on your brand terms within your PPC account.
You might have got the traffic anyway
If your competitors aren’t bidding on your brand terms and your rank No.1 organically, then arguably customers might click on your organic listing anyway and therefore, you might not need to spend the money.
If you notice that your competitors start to bid on your brand phrases though, it would be worth revisiting.
It uses budget you could use elsewhere
We mentioned previously that it is low cost and whilst it is, it is still costing you marketing budget that you might need to use elsewhere. If you’re on a tight budget and want to allocate more funds to campaigns with higher competition, then bidding on brand terms might take useful budget from keywords that might benefit from the additional spend.
There is, most of the time, a place for bidding on your brand terms but if you rank No.1 organically, don’t have any competitors trying to steal your traffic and need to use the budget elsewhere, then perhaps bidding on your brand terms isn’t necessary for your business. For everyone else, we’d recommend it.
If you’d like to chat to one of our experts about bidding on brand terms,
contact us today to see how we can help your business.
