Should you bid on your own brand terms?

As an agency, we often get asked ‘Why should we bid on Brand terms?’ ‘Isn’t it wasting money when I get the same traffic organically?’ Not necessarily, and here’s why…

There are numerous benefits to bidding on branded terms:

Got a special offer on at the minute? You can add that to the branded ad copy to drive more conversions. Paid ads really give you the opportunity to grab the attention of your potential visitors and tailor your message to their intent. Tailoring ad copy is not so easy with organic search as you cannot create multiple variants to test fairly.

Already there with organic searches? Well with ads too you can take up the whole page. You can even add ad extensions to fill the page that bit more and make sure no-one is going to be missing your site. Two results are always better than one, right?

We often see competitors bidding on brand names which will overtake the organic results. CPCs are generally much lower for branded keywords, so make the most of cheap conversions. Bidding on your own brand name means that competitors will need to pay more to appear there and because of Google’s algorithm, you’re more likely to appear above them at lower bids.

If you want to send traffic directly to a specific page rather than the homepage then you can. This is also handy if you want to run tests and optimise your website. This can be done far quicker than with organic search.

We ran a little test with the hypothesis that stopping brand ads would allow organic traffic to pick up what was lost through paid search. We stopped running Brand ads for a week to see how this affected organic traffic. The organic CTR increased through the test week, but overall CTR dropped by 20%. We were 40% down compared to our forecasted clicks and therefore lost over 1000 clicks and hundreds of potential conversions (based on the previous conversion rate).

We have run other brand tests and found similar results, the bottom line is that organic results will not fully compensate for not running brand ads. So don’t miss out on those cheap conversions because bidding on brand will ensure you’re capturing all possible traffic!