Bidding on your own brand name in Google Search Ads is a taboo as old as calling it Adwords. Just looking at data, brand campaigns always look great. Huge click through rate, conversion rates significantly higher than any other campaign. But should you do it?
The argument against bidding on your brand name.
When it comes down to it, THE argument against bidding on your own name, is not paying for traffic you would have got anyway. The default position/best practice is to abstain from brand name bidding. Your marketing budget should be focused on either growing your brand (not answering the demand for it), or performance.
When you should consider bidding on your own brand name
There are, however, a few benefits to bidding on brand name.
- If your brand name is a generic keyword/search term or competitors are bidding on your name
You need to do this to prevent brand hijacking. The worst possible scenario of a branded search is the customer being misdirected to another destination. Either they’re convinced by the other business or worse, they think they’re transacting with you. The issue is particularly an issue in the ticketing/reselling industry.
- Seasonal Promotion:
99.9% of the times your home page will appear in the search results for a branded search. Unless you have some horrific SEO issues, in which case we can help.
So let’s say you sell band t-shirts, you would want your home page titles and descriptions to be something like {brand name} band t-shirts & merch. Say Valentines day is around the corner and you want to promote your couples shirt combos. You wouldn’t want to mess with your hard earned rankings by changing your meta details to highlight your current promo. You could however run Google Ads and use your ad copy to direct customers straight to the promo’s landing page.
- Artificially inflating Google Ads performance:
Understandably there are other stakeholders who demand specific results, and they don’t care about the details. Will it benefit overall company performance, no. But if for some reason they need results without nuance it could be the move.
You can expect a better quality score, which will lead to a cheaper CPC. Of course this audience wants to come to you, so both click through and conversion rates will see a healthy boost. That top line figure of the whole accounts performance will look drastically improved.
- You have too much money.
If you’d like to donate money to Google and also take up as much real-estate on the search results page as possible, sure. But that budget could be better elsewhere.
Should you bid on a competitor’s brand name?
It really depends on where you are in the market. If you’re a new entrance brand hacking can be a great way to get some early wins on the board and take market share. The downsides are that your quality score will be terrible. Google only exists as a platform because it answers people’s queries. If the results that are coming in don’t match the search term, users will stop using Google.
That being said Google is a behemoth company, they’ll still take your money, just punish you for making their platform slightly worse. You can expect to see a terrible quality score, high CPC’s. If you offer a service you can even get disgruntled leads thinking they’ve found the competitor you’ve bid on.
You should also bid on a competitor’s name if they’re bidding on yours. Which we’ll explain next.
What to do if a competitor is bidding on your brand name?
Firstly take it as a compliment, but don’t discount the loss of potential customers. An indication you’re a market leader and people want to hijack your brand. Secondly, protect yourself and then start bidding on your own brand name, you’ll have a cheaper cpc than your competitor. Thirdly if you want to fight back and start bidding on their brand name.
Need some expert Google Ads advice?
If you’re still stumped after this guide we can take a look at your Google Ads account and advise your bidding strategy.
