Today we’re here to talk about something that seems counterintuitive. Bidding on your branded terms in PPC. Wait, what? Yup, you heard it right. And yes, we realize your likely initial thought is, “But my website is already ranked #1 organically on Google’s search results page, so I can probably skip this, right? Why bid on my brand name when I’m getting the first result for free? Isn’t that a waste of money?” Nope! We recommend it to all our clients and here’s why:

The Benefits of Bidding on Your Name

There’s are many reasons to bid on your company’s name and derivatives of those keywords:

SERP Real Estate

To begin, we’ll emphasize its importance in expanding your overall search results presence. When you bid on your brand, it inherently means you’ll take up more real estate on the search results page by ranking for both organic and paid search results. Simply put, this increases your visual dominance on a search results page, but there’s more to it than just increasing your own presence on a screen. Not only does bidding on your brand increase your own presence, but because space on a search engine results page is finite, it uses up space where your competitors could otherwise appear organically, effectively crowding them out. It’s kind of like how good bacteria in your gut is important because, besides providing health benefits, they also occupy the space where otherwise bad bacteria would live. Is that a gross analogy Yeah, probably. Sorry. But it holds true, anyway.

Cost Effective

Another great thing about this strategy? It’s cost effective! Typically, CPCs are less expensive for brand keywords than non-brand keywords. Plus, you can use your brand ads to send users to places other than your homepage — typically where organic results link to. This is particularly useful if you want to highlight a specific part of your site; for example, if you have a promotion going on, a new product, or any number of things you’d want to emphasize with their own landing page.

Addressing Competitors

One more important benefit to this strategy is preventing your competition from hijacking your brand placements on a search engine results page. Other PPC advertisers can bid on your brand name in order to make their own results appear when people search for you; bidding on your branded terms will help protect you from this, because you will have a higher quality score for that keyword.

Supplementing Organic Rankings

Bidding on your own brand can also be useful to compensate for lower organic results. This is especially helpful if you’re a newer business or a business that just launched your website, and you haven’t had a chance to gain organic ranking yet. Studies have also shown that advertising for your brand terms will increase organic performance by improving the click-through-rate of your organic listing.

Other Benefits

An indirect benefit of bidding on your brand name is that this tactic can help you refine your PPC keyword strategy elsewhere. You can use the performance data from your branded PPC keywords to better understand and, subsequently, further optimize the keywords you’re using in other PPC campaigns. Bidding on your own brand provides you with all those benefits, plus the benefits associated with all PPC — allowing you to control ad messaging, giving you an outlet to show relevant ad extensions, etc. For easy consumption, they are, once more:

• Expand your presence in search results
• Push down your competitors’ presence in search results
• Prevent your competition from hijacking your branded terms
• Do it all for cheap!
• Send users to customized landing pages
• Compensate for lower organic results
• Provide insight that helps you determine and refine further PPC strategy

So, you’ve decided to go for it. (Good call!) Now what?

Things to Consider When Bidding on Your Branded Terms

When you start making a plan, there are a few best practices to note, many of which are similar to non-brand PPC campaigns.

Selecting Keywords

It’s a good start to consider the different keyword variations that have value to you. This could be something like bidding on just your brand name, your brand plus a product name, your brand plus a website keyword, and so on. Putting the effort in to analyze which options are best for you takes time and energy at the start, but it will yield better results in the long term.

Negative Keywords

It’s also important to choose the words that you don’t want in conjunction with your brand. For example, in many accounts we will use “jobs” or “careers” as negative keywords, because we are using the PPC account to acquire new customers not to enhance their recruitment strategy.

Testing Ad Copy

Also, it’s useful to test different copy in your branded ads. This could include, among a more generic, standard ad, one with copy that promotes special offers or specific aspects of your brand. And, since we know competitors will sometimes bid on your brand name, try copy that emphasizes that you are what they’re looking for under this search term; terms like “official site” and other similar phrases emphasize your legitimacy.

Using Ad Extensions

Whatever copy you go with, we further recommend that you leverage ad extensions to minimize the steps users must take to get what they need. This could include sitelink extensions, pricing extensions, promotion extensions, and more. Overall, the process is pretty simple. Just like with all PPC campaigns, you’ll likely end up trying out different options and tweaking your approach occasionally based on results. Whichever specific tactics you take in bidding on your brand name, the decision to bid at all is the first step to optimizing your online performance. Our digital marketing experts at Fujisan Marketing can assist with getting your brand PPC campaigns up and running. Ready to get started? Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you!