To Brand or Not to Brand: 4 Reasons why you need to bid on Brand Terms

I have been working in digital marketing for just over 5 years with most of my time spent on PPC and paid social. Coming from the PPC world, I think we all have a list of FAQs that are almost always guaranteed to be asked regardless of the client. Whether or not to bid on Brand terms is probably in my top 5 of most frequently asked questions.

Why does it come up? Usually this comes up when discussing budgets and future planning. Many clients have asked me whether or not bidding on brand terms is a waste since non-brand could always use the extra budget. There are two main reasons why clients may see bidding on brand as wasteful:

• These users already know the brand, so we’re paying again to just get their clicks

• Our SEO efforts should be able to cover us on page 1 and pick up any slack missing from PPC ads

There are a few issues with these reasonings and many benefits to bidding on brand terms.

1. Easily change your Brand landing page and message

Usually, when someone performs a general brand search for your brand, they are typically sent to the homepage. But what if you want to send brand traffic or a particular audience’s brand traffic, to a promotional page? With PPC ads, you have complete control on where you send your users. You can change your landing page easily and whenever you need to.

You can also change your messaging whenever needed. Your brand organic SERP listings are more limited here, as you need to optimize your titles, descriptions and meta tags to ensure you have the best possible ranking in the organic SERP. For PPC, it’s easy to change your messaging to push a new promotion or suit a season.

2. Dominate the top of the page

Using PPC as part of your brand strategy allows you to dominate the top of the search results with multiple ad extensions (sitelinks, callouts, call extensions, location extensions, etc). Being top of the page for Brand terms is a no-brainer -- your ROAS, CTRs and Conversion rates will be significantly stronger.

3. Beat your competitors

PPC is competitive and companies are always looking for ways to beat the competition. Your competitors can bid on your brand terms, as long as their ad copy does not have your brand in the copy. A consumer must be able to tell that the ad belongs to you and not your competitor.

By not bidding on your own brand keywords, your competitor’s paid ads will be shown above your organic listings. This could decrease CTR for your organic listings, leading to less click traffic. By bidding on your brand keywords, you make the clicks more expensive for your competitors as they will need to bid higher than you to outrank you in Google Ads’ auction.

4. Brand keywords are CHEAP!

Typically, your brand keywords will be cheaper. There is less competition and Google Ads will reward these keywords due to their strong performance. Brand keywords will have stronger CTRs, better conversion rates and higher Quality Scores, than your non-brand keywords. The stronger your keyword, the cheaper it is for your keyword to enter the auction, so bidding on brand is very affordable.

Bidding on Brand terms is affordable and smart. Don't compromise your Brand program by not bidding on those keywords.