Should You Bid on Your Own Brand?

One question which businesses often ask is

Should you bid on your own brand keywords?

and as with most things in life, the answer is… it depends.

First Off… What are Brand Keywords?

Brand keywords are anything which someone would search for when looking for your company in particular. Let’s say your business is “Melanie’s Unbelievable Fudge“. Brand keywords would be something unique, or closely tied to your business name such as “melanie’s unbelievable fudge”, “melanie’s fudge”, “melanies fudge”, “www.melaniesfudge.com”, etc. If you’re only targetting a small geographic area than a term such as “unbelievable fudge”, which is a bit broader but closely associated with your company, could be appropriate.

When You Shouldn’t Bid on Your Own Brand Terms

If you hold the top organic (natural unpaid) spot in Google for your brand terms and no one else is running ads on them, then why pay twice. Let your free listing get all of the clicks and save your money for other keywords which you aren’t currently ranking highly for.

When You Should Bid on Your Own Brand Terms

There are a lot of reasons why you should bid on your own brand terms. If your situation matches any of these criteria then we strongly recommend you setup an ad campaign to take back control of your brand and avoid losing customers.

1. You don’t have the top organic spot on google for your brand – Then basically you don’t exist. If your customers can’t find you then all of that word of mouth is useless and it will make you look very amateur so branded ads are right for you.
2. A competitor has ads running on your brand keywords – If you’re Melanie’s Unbelievable Fudge the last thing you want is Bobby’s Fudge running an ad for 50% off whenever someone searches for your brand. If someone’s searching for you then they’re probably already half sold. Don’t give a competitor the chance to scoop them up first.
3. People have a hard time finding your brand – If you have a name like ‘Melanie’s Unbelievable Fudge” then people might forget the “unbelievable” part and get it confused. Maybe they’re searching for “Melanie’s Amazing Fudge” by mistake. If your website isn’t showing up organically for those other terms then maybe it’s worth bidding on them.
4. You’d like to hide competitors – If you have some very strong competitors who you’d rather not have clients seeing, then by running an ad on your branded term, and holding the top organic spot, you’re able to push their listing down two spots and take some of the attention away.
5. You’d like to hide negative reviews – Unfortunately sometimes negative reviews happen an regardless of whether it’s verified or justified, if it’s showing in search results then it can hurt your reputation. By running an ad on your brand term you push that negative review down another spot and have two opportunities to catch a customer’s click before they’re influenced by that review.

If you’re still not sure if branded keyword ads are right for you, or if you’d like to have us set them up and optimize them for you, then contact us today for a free online advertising quote.