Should I bid on my own Brand name in Google Search?
Should I bid on my own Brand name in Google Search?
Why are we here?
Where are we from?
Should I bid on my own Brand name in Google Search?
The Big 3 Questions in life.
Let’s start with the third one today.
What it is:
Bidding on your own Brand’s name
In paid search campaigns, you can choose which keywords to include in your campaings. For many brands, when you judge the keywords’ performance on ROAS, Revenue or CPC it is hard to beat your own brand name (e.g. “Quicksilver” will typically do better than “men’s boardies”). This is because of the customer intent: If it’s you they’re looking for (hello), they’re more likely to click vs doing a more generic search
Reasons you should bid on your own brand name:
Protect my Brand
When you bid high enough, you can make sure that your brand appears first in the list of results on Google.
This means it protects you against anyone else appearing before you (for ecomm brand, typically competitors, but also resellers or much worse; scammers)
Control the message
The text in the ad can be changed to whatever and whenever you like it. In the event of a sale, you can call this out in the ad text, making sure everyone sees this straight away. That massive promo starting today will likely not appear in organic results straight away.
Control the journey
In organic results, it’s up to Google where users go first and what they see. For example: As much as you’d like them to see the metatags for your homepage and then going there, Google might send them to the products page.
More revenue
Multiple tests show that turning on Brand Name campaigns in Google generates more absolute revenue. The hypotheses for the reasons vary, but between a) Dominating the results page (SERP) b) building trust (if they’re running ads, they must be legit) and c) capturing more of the available traffic demand, something seems to be working.
Volume from the Paid Search channel
As much as bidding on your own brand’s name is not the most elegant way of driving traffic, it does drive traffic. With limited budget to spend, it is likely to be your most efficient way of generating traffic and revenue. If you’re pushed to make budget this week, upping the brand name campaign’s budget is one of the surest ways to get there.
Reasons why you should not bid on your own brand name:
It costs money
As much as we think that for most ecomm brands you will get the best results from brand name search campaigns, these are still paid campaigns. If you don’t have money to spend or if you cannot take the risk of the spend not giving a return, you shouldn’t be spending. There are free ways of generating traffic and revenue
Low competition
If there is little competition in the field and no one else is bidding on your brand name, there is no need to take traffic away from the competition, resellers and scammers. What goes into that is:
Low brand recognition
If no one knows your brand, no one will google it (unless of course you like confusing people by picking a very generic name
You might get lazy on SEO
Channeling a lot of demand for your brand through paid search, means there is less urgency to improve your organic rankings. Scarcity often leads to creativity and not relying on paid traffic might just mean you reconsider your content, technical setup and link building strategy.
