Question:

Should I bid on my brand name in my pay per click campaign? My website is already at number one in Google’s organic listings so customers who know about my brand will find me anyway? I don’t want to pay for traffic that I am already receiving for free.

Alice, Kent

Hi Alice,

This is a really popular topic, that  splits the PPC community in two. Many believe, as you suggest that you are already receiving traffic and conversions for your brand terms for free and paying for this traffic is a waste of your PPC budget and time. However, in this instance I support Google’s point of view that you should include brand name terms as part of your PPC campaign and here’s why.

Firstly, customers will often type in your brand name or website address into Google, rather than typing in the website directly. If your competitors are bidding on your brand name, but you aren’t, your customers could be misled into clicking on their site instead. You also need to make sure that you are outbidding your competitors, or their paid adverts could be displayed and highlighted above your natural listing. On the plus side you can prohibit your brand name being used in text ads by your competitors, so their adverts will not contain highlighted text.

Brand terms also produce high levels of conversions at very low costs. With many of our campaigns, brand terms account for over 50% of all the conversions but with only 10% of the budget, so although you are paying for these conversions the cost can be as little as a few pence each. In many cases even if you are not bidding on branded terms, the tiny amount of budget you save will not result in conversions for your non branded traffic. If you have analytics or tracking enabled on your site, you can easily find out whether your brand converts in PPC, SEO or both, and turn off PPC if, for some reason, it’s not working for you. But in most cases we’ve found that Brand traffic converts so regualrly and at such a low cost there’s not really an argument for not bidding on it.

Another point is that if your brand is well known, it is often worth creating a separate brand campaign, so that it can have a separate budget to your regular Ad Group, so that your brand budget will not be eaten up by some of your higher volume keywords.

It’s worth noting that if your website is not well ranked in Googles natural listings  (for example if your site is new or has contains generic keywords such as www.italyvillas.com, making good rankings more difficult) you should automatically be bidding on your brand name, at least until your natural listings improve.

Hope this has answered your question.