Lately, a lot of people have been asking what our views are on bidding on your own brand name in PPC.  It’s a difficult one, there is a lot of chatter about this within the SEO community and unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules.  However, we have a few observations that should be considered before you bid, or turn your back on the opportunity…

We know that people are typing in brand names into search engines and, when this happens, it is obviously in your interest for your website to appear in a good position in the results. The only real issue is whether one should actually bid on your brand name and pay for the traffic.

There a many reasons for bidding and reasons for not bidding.  Below are some of the considerations that I feel are important when it comes to deciding if this tactic is worth adopting.

You are not appearing in the organic listings

As unlikely as this might seem, we have seen a number of instances where a company does not rank top for their own name. Maybe they are in the first page but in position 10, maybe they are on page 30 or maybe they are very new and not indexed at all.  Even worse, they could be banned from the listings altogether - not something that we’d wish on anyone, and thankfully we haven’t ever seen it with any of our clients.

Whatever, the situation, if you are not at the top of the organic listings for your name, then bidding on your brand name will make it easier for your site to be seen by those typing in your name.

Someone else is bidding on your name

We have seen many cases when a rival company is bidding on our client’s brand name.  Technically they shouldn’t be allowed to do this.  If your brand is trademark protected, you can approach Google and they will prevent those companies using your trademark.  However, if your company name is a common set of keywords, such as “SpainHolidays”, then there is little you can do about it. In this case, a strategy of bidding on your own brand name will enable you to appear higher up in the listings than your rival.  This could be expensive but you will need to weigh up the cost of potential lost business when deciding if you wish to incur this expense.

Bidding on misspellings

Even if you rank highly for your own brand name, have you ever considered all the possible misspellings of your name?  Usually one does not appear well (or at all) in the organic listing for hese and Google does not always come up with “Did you mean ……”  In this case, finding all the possible variations of your name that could be typed into a search engine can represent a very low cost and profitable source of traffic.

A quick search for LeadGenerators on a “typo generator” gave us 276 variants including leadgeneratores, ledagenerators and ladgenerators.  Sure, by bidding on these typos, you may get very low traffic numbers, but that traffic will be incredibly cheap and will often come with good conversion figures.

Cannibalisation of your Organic Listings

Let’s assume that you have the top position in the organic listings already.  In this case, would an additional PPC campaign bring in more traffic in total or would it make you pay for traffic that you were already getting from your organic listing? This is probably the most debated issue, which has always been strange to me as it fairly easy to find out for yourself (with a decent stats package).  Each company is different and we have seen different results when testing this for various clients.  In some cases we have found that all that a client has achieved is to pay for traffic that they would have received for free, while in other cases we have seen this dual approach deliver more traffic in total.  The only way to know the answer to this is to look at your own statistics (preferably a stats package that differentiates between PPC and SEO traffic).

Is it all worth it?

The last issue to consider in this whole debate about paying for traffic from your brand name is that of ROI.  Here again, the only way of measuring this is to have tracking systems that will show which key phrases convert into desired actions.  In some cases we have seen that SEO traffic converts better than PPC traffic for the same key phrase.  The reason why this is so important is that even if you get lots of cheap traffic from your PPC campaign, if it does not convert for you, then there is no need to keep paying for it.  On the other hand, if your PPC traffic converts better than your SEO traffic then, even at a relatively high cost per click, your PPC traffic is worth it.  And this applies equally to your brand name as a key phrase.

So, should one bid on one’s brand?  Sometimes in marketing, we need to hurl conventional wisdom and everyone else’s opinions out of the window.  Aside from the tips above, the best advice I can offer is to experiment; jump in the deep end, test the different traffic sources and see what results you achieve.  There really is no better way of knowing if this tactic works for you…..or not.