Should You Bid On Your Own Brand Name in Google Ads?

Should you bid on your own brand name? This is a question that many marketers and brand owners ask whether they should or shouldn’t do. 

Bidding on your own keyword is the practice of placing PPC bids on your brand name. Many business owners and marketers are now realizing that it makes sense to bid on their own brand name. 

If you don't do it, you could be losing a considerable amount of traffic to your competitors. You may be ranking well on organic search, however, you still need to work on your paid search. 

Often, other businesses try to bid on the brand names of other companies thus denying the companies traffic that they should be enjoying. There are many reasons you would want to consider bidding on your brand name and they include:

1. If you bid on your own brand name, you'll potentially dominate your SERP  

When you bid on your brand name keyword, you’ll have better control over your search engine results page. 

When it comes to the search engine results page, you know that two is pretty better than one. In the same way, you increase click-through by having multiple links within an email when you give the searchers more chances to click, it works to your advantage. 

Businesses are utilizing this strategy of bidding on their own keyword to help dominate their search engine results page. You can call it a defensive mechanism but it also makes sense to ensure that you’re losing any traffic to your competitors.

2. Bidding on your brand name helps funnel audiences to higher converting pages

PPC campaigns are known to attract traffic that is closer to converting. 

When you bid on your brand name in your PPC campaign, you are funnelling people to landing pages that are considered to have a higher converting probability. You are able to capture high-quality leads considered to be near the point of converting. 

You know that the people you find searching for your company or branded terms already know your company. Maybe they searched for your company in the past or they have heard about you from their friends. 

In most cases, these people or audiences are further along within the buying cycle compared to someone else searching more generic terms. Taking advantage of this kind of traffic that is closer to converting can increase your odds of making sales easily. 

3. You can drop traffic into CRO-optimized version of your site when you bid on your brand terms

The ability to direct brand-name related traffic within an optimised landing page is a great strategy. 

When you have traffic going to pages optimized for conversion rate optimization (CRO), you know that you are not wasting your money on paid searches. This way, you know that the leads are likely to convert easily and get that sale.

4. Google loves it when you bid on your brand name

Google is in the business of making money, so when you move ahead to have a PPC campaign that features your own branded keyword, you are showing Google that you need that traffic which could otherwise be going to other businesses. And for sure, they will give you. You may assume that Google’s primary job is to give people what exactly they are looking for. 

So, you won't bother having a PPC campaign based on your own keyword since you think that Google will automatically give you that traffic. That traffic may be yourself by definition, however, when your competitors realize that you’re not bidding on your branded keyword, they do. 

This is how PPC agencies and experts are getting some juicy benefits by bidding on your branded keywords as it brings then some cheap PPC traffic. 

Always be on the lookout to find out if someone could be bidding on your company or brand name. If you find there is another person bidding, you need to seriously consider bidding on your company name so that you keep the traffic from being channelled to your competitor. 

Google loves this sort of bidding war because they know they are making more on paid searches. Obviously, Google will give you priority when you bid on your own branded terms over your competitors bidding on the same. 

Don’t pigeonhole yourself by saying that you won't pay for your branded keywords because it’s Google’s responsibility. It may be Google’s job to ensure it ranks you first for your brand, however, if other people are paying to use your brand name on their PPC campaigns, then you could have traffic going to them. 

This is traffic that you should be enjoying. Bidding on your brand name is always better with the exception of when you don’t do it, it means Google shows zero ads, and you rank number one. 

Nevertheless, this is something that will require you to constantly monitor and tweak because when you bring it to an end, others will start and your traffic will begin going to those competitors. 

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