Should You Bid on Your Brand Terms in Paid Search?

A couple of years ago, we released a video talking about whether or not you should bid on your competitors’ brand names. Now, if you’re interested in that, you can check out this video right here. But one of the other questions we get almost, if not more frequently than the competitors’ questions is, should I bid on my own brand name?

And again, rather than trying to answer those questions one off, one at a time, we thought it would be a good idea to put together a video. So today, I want to run through some of the reasons why you might bid on your brand name, some of the reasons why you might not, and hopefully give you enough information to make up the choice for yourself.

I’m going to start off talking about reasons why you should not bid on your brand name or some of the reasons that people bring up to me when they’re arguing that you shouldn’t bid on your own brand name.

First of all, the list for why you shouldn’t is a little bit shorter. And spoiler alert, by the end of this video, I think you’ll know where I come down on this topic. So I wanted to start with the negatives list. The first consideration is that brand adds extra spend to the campaigns. As you can see here, this is performance from an actual account that we use. And running a brand campaign added an additional 12,000, almost $13,000 in ad spend for the account on just the brand name alone.

On the grand scheme of things, that’s a little under 10% of the spend for the account. And if you’re tight on budget, it might feel like you need to reallocate that brand spend into non-brand campaigns where you’re going to be targeting people who aren’t already looking for your brand.

The second argument is that it’s hard to justify if you don’t have any competition. If your Auction Insights report looks like this, where over the past 30 days you are the only brand that is showing up that has impression share, you can see in the bottom right there’s one line item of one, and there’s just nobody else bidding on your terms. It might feel a little bit silly to bid on your brand keywords because nobody else is there in the first place.

And if your organic listings are doing well enough, you should be showing up at the top of the page already. And that brings us back to the previous performance chart that we saw before, but it’s a slightly different take on the argument. I hear this all the time. Those people were going to convert anyway. We don’t need to spend on them. We don’t have any competition. They were already going to convert.

So why would we spend additional money trying to generate people who already know our brand name, who are already coming through the funnel? As you can see in the screenshot, the click-through rate is way higher, the conversion rate is a little bit higher, and the cost per lead is lower.

The argument many people have is that this was already going to happen, and instead of generating these leads through the organic search, we paid $12,000 to generate them through Paid. Those are the main arguments I hear about why you should not be bidding on your brand terms or why certain companies don’t want to bid on their own brand name.

So overall, these are the three biggest arguments I hear with why you shouldn’t bid on your brand name. It costs extra money. If we don’t have any competition, why should we do it? And these people are already aware of our brand, so they were going to convert anyway. There’s no reason to do this.

But now, let’s get to the flip side of the coin, and again, you’ll probably realize this is where I come down on this argument. Let’s start talking about the reasons why you should bid on your brand name and what the benefits are of doing so.

The first is so you can protect your brand name if you do have competition like Nike Shoes does here. It can be a really good idea to bid on your own brand name to make sure that you show up first in the paid listings. If Nike wasn’t advertising here, Finish Line and JD Sports would be populating those top spots, potentially stealing some of the traffic.

Now, this example might not be perfect because Finish Line and JD Sports are effectively retailers of Nike, but I will guarantee you that Nike makes more of a profit on their shoes if they sell them on their own site. So even though these other brands are retailers for them, their margins are going to be better if they sell them from our own website.

So if you want to make sure that you are always showing up in the top spot, it’s a good idea to bid on your brand name and make sure that you own that space. Here’s an example of a brand that is not owning their space because it doesn’t look like they’re running ads. And that’s Zoho CRM.

This is some software that we’ve seen a lot of customers use. It can be a great tool. But in this specific search engine results page, they are getting outbid and outranked by Freshworks Pipedrive and Yext. Their brand is the fourth listing on the page because they are not running any sort of paid ads even though they have the Knowledge graph off to the right.

I would also argue that the ad copy that these three brands are doing are pretty strong. The first is saying that Fresh works or Fresh Sales is doing really well against the competition. They’re pretty proud of that. Pipedrive all she wants you to look at their CRM compared to Zoho. They’ve got some site links down below. And then Next is saying that you can start a free trial.

If you go to the organic listing for Zoho down at the bottom, it’s just the basic information on the website. There’s not a good call to action there. You’re not trying to call out any competitors, anything like that. So this listing might get lost, and you might lose some of your potential customers to these additional brands because their ad copy is compelling.

The next benefit is that you get to control messaging. I talked about that a little bit on the Zoho page, where that ad copy wasn’t as appealing as the ads. But even if you don’t have somebody else bidding on your brand terms, like this HubSpot example here, you can see the very big difference in the ad listing versus the organic listing for HubSpot.

With the ad listing as well as the organic, it is clear that this is CRM software or a CRM platform, but the organic listing then just says the brand name, whereas the ad talks about a benefit. You can increase your leads. And then, even though both of them have four additional site links, the ad has the expanded versions, whereas the organic one is only a small amount, and the ad has a little bit better-curated set of links, in my opinion, in terms of trying to give people the information they might need and then help them convert down into a free trial.

You can get certified on the first one. On the third site link, you can see all of their free marketing resources. You can find the pricing information that you would need on the second link, and then the very last one is a call to action to get you sign up for a free trial. On the organic page, you only have additional product pages on the site.

You’re not really helping the user take the next step other than just telling them the names of your products and giving them the option to learn more about them. And that leads us into the next benefit, which is that you can control your calls to action better with a brand campaign than you can with just your organic listing.

I’m using our own brand here because we’re not running any ads, but we also don’t have anybody showing up yet. You can see here that the Paid Media Pros, we own pretty much the top page when it comes to searching, just Paid Media Pros, whether it’s our website at the top, the YouTube channel second, some suggested videos, and then all of our social profiles are below. But this organic listing doesn’t really do a good job of calling out any calls to action that we would have on the site.

Let’s say that our goal was to start generating more speaking engagements or consulting. The only small link that you can see here is the CS speak in the small row of site links on that organic listing. So if I wanted to better control my call to action, I might put together some ad copy that looks like this, where it calls out specifically that you can book us to speak. We can help expand your knowledge; we’re experts.

And then, I can land users on a very specific page of the site where you can fill out the form to see us speak. That organic listing that I showed a little bit ago will only take you to the home page. So not only can you make sure that you’ve controlled your messaging, you can control your calls to action and send a user to a conversion rate optimized landing page to get better performance out of those users.

The next benefit for brand campaigns is that they usually have lower-cost traffic and better-performing users. This is due to a couple of factors. Typically, you don’t have lots of competition on your brand name, especially not in the way that you would on a non-brand term.

Second, as one of the arguments that we already saw against using brand bidding, these users are a little further down the funnel. They’re probably more likely to convert than somebody bidding on non-brand. The three lines that I have highlighted here are all brand campaigns.

As you can see, the cost per click is relatively low, the cost per conversion is low, the impression share and conversion value divided by cost are pretty high, and the cost per conversion is low compared to the other campaigns in the account. That doesn’t mean that there’s not outliers where the performance is better on some metrics for non-brand than it is for brand.

But if we look, on the whole, we can see that click-through rate for brand campaigns is way higher than non-brand. Cost per click is quite a bit lower. So is cost per conversion. And the conversion rate is only a tick higher, but it ends up resulting in much better performance.

So overall, even though you’re spending an additional $12,000 to $13,000, you are generating quite a number of conversions for a much lower cost per conversion than you were on those non-brand campaigns. But again, you might still be asking yourself, why would I bid on these users if they were already going to convert in the first place?

And I’m going to leave that to our friends at closed loop to argue against because they ran a test in 2021 that tested whether keeping your brand search ON or OFF was better for your campaigns. There have been a number of tests like this over the entire time I’ve been working in PPC. But I’ll be frank; this is the most recent experiment I could find with data to back it up. But all of them anecdotally that I have ever seen have agreed with this finding.

And it says that when you have brand search ON or effectively the second line in this table, you get slightly more impressions, a bit more clicks, but your click-through rate is much higher, your conversions are higher, and your purchases are higher.

If you want to learn more about this specific test, we have the link down here below so you can go check that out. But as I mentioned, even though it might feel like your organic listing will pick up all of the traffic that your brand campaigns would have forfeited by being turned off, that is almost never the case.

They might pick up half to three-quarters of the traffic, but any experiment that I’ve ever seen that has been run this way has never seen organic pick up 100% of the volume that would have been associated with the paid brand campaigns.

So as a quick recap, there are lots of benefits to bidding on your brand name. You can protect your space. You can control the message and the call to action to make sure that you are capturing low-cost, low-funnel users and driving incremental traffic that you would not have seen from organic listings.

Clearly, by the way, that I finished out this video, you can tell that I am a proponent of bidding for your brand name because I think the benefits outweigh the negatives. But if you’re ever curious, run a test in the same way that closed Loop did. Have your brand campaigns running for a little bit, and then turn them off for the same amount of time and see what your overall volume looks like in your Google Analytics account or in your CRM and see what makes the most sense for you.

Written by Michelle Morgan