I was talking to a friend a few days ago about whether running pay per click a campaign for your brand is a good idea. He is of the school of thought that if your brand is ranking well in the organic SERPs then bidding for paid brand terms is a waste of a campaign budget.
I disagree and feel there are a number of reasons why bidding on your brand terms is an important facet of your pay per click campaign.
Competitors may be bidding on your brand
With the change in Google’s trademark bidding regulations, it is now increasingly common that your competitors are able bid on your trademarked terms including your company name.
The result is that their paid adverts could appear over your organic search listing and you miss out on potential traffic that should have been yours.
Increased Visibility
Achieving the top organic search placement and paid search result clearly increases your brand visibility. This serves two purposes:
- You reduce the number of places on the search engines first page for competitors to appear, thus increasing your likelihood of a potential customer clicking through to your website.
- Duel paid and organic listings have been shown to increase a customer’s brand affinity and brand recall which can result in increased traffic.
Brands can close sales
The online buying cycling shows that for high cost items and Business To Business purchases, product/service research is much more thorough before a purchase is made.
Customers could be visiting your site through one of your PPC adverts during their research phase which won’t necessarily lead to a direct sale at the time. They could be collating information before making a final decision of where to buy from.
When they do reach the purchasing stage there is a good chance that they will look for your brand name or company name to find you quickly. If your brand is not easy to find you run the risk of missing out on the sale.
User’s lack of knowledge
30% of web users do not understand the difference between organic and paid search results, they may just assume that the top result is the most important and click on it.
You risk missing out on this traffic if you are not appearing near the top of the search results pages.
So it is my opinion that the potential loss in traffic from not bidding on your brand outweighs any negative arguments.
It can be really hard to sell this to clients, but it is more often than not in their interests. There is much less of a competition problem on Brand terms than there used to be, but I find a simple equation determines whether brand bidding works: Does it incrementally drive more revenue (when you substitute the cost) than Organic alone? You can influence this to your advantage by sending traffic to better converting pages, split testing and running offers with stronger copy to improve conversions. If needed, a useful method of dealing with competing advertisers is to ask them to stop bidding on your brand terms. Works more often than you might think
Hi Simon,
Thanks for the reply, you raise an interesting point regarding the power you have to test all forms of different commercial messages and landing pages. I think from personal experience brand campaigns provide a reliable base to explore which commercial message works best for the client.
As you say, it can be a hard sell for customers but ultimately the final indicator of success will be whether the client sees an increase in sales and roi.
Thanks again.
Mackenzie