This is one of the most common questions you'll get asked as a PPC account manager.
Some clients are adamant that you shouldn't ever do it, whereas others understand the value and the reasons behind the decision to do it.
In the following post I will explore several different reasons why you may or may not wish to bid on brand terms.
Natural search position
The first thing you should think about is where you are in the organic search results. If you are anywhere other than first place then you must bid on brand terms.
Anything below first place on the organic results gets a relatively small proportion of clicks, even if it is exactly what the user is searching for.
Be sure to see how you rank naturally for a range of different search terms relating to your brand, including misspellings, long tail keywords and the words in a different order if your brand name is more than one word.
Competitors
Is anyone else bidding on your brand terms? Are they appearing in the premium advertising positions above your organic result? Look at this result when we search for Admiral life insurance:
We can see several companies actually appearing above Admiral's natural listing. This could lead to them stealing potential customers.
If this is ever the case then you should always consider bidding on your brand terms also. It shouldn't take long for your CTR to increase to a high enough level to give you a strong quality score and get you top spot for a decent price.
Other advertising forms
Another thing to consider on this point is if you are spending money on other advertising sources. If you've already paid for the traffic once (via TV/radio/newspapers etc.) you really don't want competitors stealing your traffic.
If you've spent £1,000,000 on TV advertising - you really shouldn't mind paying an extra five pence for a click on a PPC advert! Basically the cost per click on your own brand terms should generally be extremely low, so any kind of incremental gain from this would be very much worth it.
Other companies pretending to be you
This is quite a rare occurrence, but I have seen it happen a few times. If your brand is not a registered trademark then there is (theoretically) nothing to stop other people actually putting your company name in their advert.
Prospective searchers may just read the title and click the advert unknowingly. If your company name is a registered trademark then you should be sure to register it with Google.
In the following example we can see that the second result mentions FortiGuard – but they are actually a completely different company and not a reseller.
How good is the URL?
If the URL of your website is not very clear then you should consider bidding on brand terms to ensure that you can gain all relevant traffic.
You need to make it as obvious as possible for people so they know that they are clicking on the correct link. For example, if you look at Charles Tyrwhitt you will see that their URL is www.ctshirts.co.uk.
The brand needs to ensure that people searching for Charles Tyrwhitt will end up in the right place and this can be much more easily achieved with a well-focused PPC message than the natural search result (especially if including messaging such as 'Official Site') in the ad.
This situation is more likely to happen if you sell multiple products which are all created by your own company (and therefore hosted on the same domain). As an example, if you search for the screen recording software 'Hypersnap', this is the natural search result you'll see:
This is the official site that sells this product – it really doesn't work well to engage the user and let them know that this is where they want to be. They may well not be aware that the product is made by Hyperonics. It's hard to even know that this is the official site.
For this reason, I feel a PPC ad would work a lot better. Something like:
This makes it much more obvious that this is the official site, gives you a short introduction as to what the product does and has a call to action to engage the user.
Quick change
PPC adverts are much more powerful when it comes to quickly changing the messaging associated with your brand.
For example, if you have a sale on - you can instantly change a PPC ad to promote the discounts. This can also be useful for new product launches and other marketing or brand related changes.
Changes to a natural search title tag could take several days or even weeks to update (depending on the authority of your site.)
Testing different messages
It's also much easier to test different messaging in a PPC ad text. Rotating the ad text and using multiple variations of an advert will allow you to understand how users respond to different messages.
This messaging can then be rolled out to natural listings as well as offline media such as flyers and newspaper adverts.
SERP real estate
Sometimes a justified reason to advertise can simply be to take up as much room as possible on the search engine results page. This will have a large benefit in establishing yourself as an authority in your sector.
However, it will also work well to push your competitors off the page or push a natural result as low as possible – ideally 'below the fold'.
For example, a search for 'Safestyle windows' will bring up a negative 1-star review in the natural search results. However, with a clever use of advertising and additional sitelinks, they have managed to push this result down the page so that a lot of users will click through to the Safestyle website before actually noticing the negative review.
In conclusion, there are a lot of potential good reasons to be bidding on your brand terms.
In most cases I would suggest that it is correct to use some PPC budget bidding on brand terms (you shouldn't have to allocate too much because of the low cost of brand clicks). It's always important however to consider the reasoning behind your decision and keep a careful eye on ROI too.
Pete Whitmarsh is PPC Manager at Search Laboratory and a guest blogger on Econsultancy.
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