Bidding on your own brand name is often overlooked in Adwords strategies and you could be losing out on revenue in doing so.
The most common argument for not bidding is ‘My organic listing shows at the top, why do I want to pay for branded clicks?’ This is a fair point; you will be paying for people to visit your site who are already searching for your brand name; however there are three core reasons to implement a branded campaign:
- Protect Yourself From Competitors
- Dominate Above The Fold
- Cheap CPA on Expensive Terms
Protect Yourself From Competitors
It’s difficult to stop a competitor or 3rd party site from bidding on your brand name. Take the hotel industry for example; you’ll often find the likes of Booking.com, Trivago and Travelzoo advertising on hotel names as they want to sell rooms for that hotel and generate a commission. Why give them the opportunity?
As the brand in question, you’ll automatically have a higher Quality Score when bidding on your brand terms, as you’re the most relevant site, meaning your cost per click will be cheaper and your ad will show higher on the page. Couple this with the fact that you aren’t paying the 3rd party site commission for the sale and it’s a win-win.
In other instances, it’s advised to bid on your brand name to prevent direct competitors from doing so. Whilst it’s unlikely, a user will click on a competitor if searching specifically for your brand, for the small cost your CPC will be it’s not worth the risk.
Tip. We don’t advise our Paid Search clients to bid on their competitors as it can often become a ‘glass house & stones’ scenario and results in a bidding war you’ll never win.
Dominate Above The Fold
Google is constantly changing and testing the SERP layout. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen the removal of paid ads on the right-hand side and the end of Google Compare: in combining a Paid Search and Organic Search strategy you have the ability to dominate above the fold (top half) of the page.
In doing so you push related sites such as Wikipedia or any news articles further down the page, giving users in the buying cycle more opportunity to get straight onto your site and convert.
Another benefit to this, is that should you have any negative PR ranking on the first page of Google, you can again push this further down the page so that it isn’t one of the first things a user sees about your site. A negative PR SEO strategy would help to resolve this in the long run, but Paid ads are a quick win.
Cheap CPC on Expensive Terms
This is the icing on the cake, especially for industries with high CPC terms. Through Adwords, you have the ability to add an ad extension named Sitelink Extension to your Ad Groups. This extension allows you to advertise an additional six areas underneath your ad (they don’t need to be related to your ad and keywords) and you’ll be charged the same CPC as the keyword that triggered your ad to show if a user clicks your site link.
For example, say you’re bidding 15p on the term Ricemedia and have extensions for SEO, PPC & Social Media showing under the ad. If a user clicks any of those you’ll be charged only 15p, whereas you may be bidding over £1 to appear for the term SEO.
In essence, you’re directing traffic straight to your service/product page for a fraction of the cost and you know they’re already interested in your company as they searched for your brand name in the first place – it’s a no brainer!
This tactic is especially useful in industries such as law and PPI where bids on terms such as ‘Personal Injury Claim’ and ‘PPI Claim’ can easily have an average CPC over £20. Why pay that when you can pay pennies and get a user to exactly the same landing page?
In summary, bidding on your brand terms can generate additional revenue at a small cost per acquisition. It protects your brand from competitors and 3rd party sites, whilst giving you the opportunity to push users to specific areas through paid search for a lower cost.
It’s a tactic we write into the strategies for all our Paid Search clients, simply because it works! Should you have any questions regarding Paid Search or bidding strategies then give us a call, we’ll be happy to help generate you a strong ROI.
