When it comes to bidding on brand terms, there is a question that has come across the minds of all PPC specialists: should I pay money for brand keyword clicks if the brand is already ranking high in organic results? If so, when should I do it?

In my view (and our agency’s approach), we should treat every single product and service individually, and even when applying best practices, we should build stand-alone strategies for each. That includes brand terms ranking vs bidding.

If a company has no valid reason for taking over the search results page and there is no competitive bidding on their brand keywords, they should focus on more generic terms and moving the budget there instead of bidding on brand keywords. This will most likely impact PPC results negatively, by lowerering ROI or lead volume, however, we care for omnichannel results and recommend not treating channels on their own. Moreover, we build full-funnel strategies for our clients, and there is a special place for bottom of the funnel plans, like brand terms bidding and ranking.

One could say – it is easy to block your competition from bidding on your brand keywords by issuing a Trade Mark claim with Google. Sounds brilliant. However, the thing is that you can only claim TM if competitors are using your brand terms in their copy. Even if you raise concern regarding TM, competitors will be only blocked from adding your brand name in their copy and not anywhere else.

WHAT COULD BE A REASON FOR BIDDING ON YOUR BRAND TERMS THEN?

If your competition is bidding on your brand terms and showing up above your organic results – you need to step in and moreover try to win the auction to rank as number one in search results. Moreover, it is suggested to include as many ad extensions as possible to move other ads down to let yours gain all the attention.

How about when no competitors are challenging you and you are ranking high in organic search? Still, the reasons for bidding on your own brand terms can be endless – though they usually start with the need to take over the search results page.

For instance, if you need to push down negative feedback, it is much more manageable with an extensive PPC ad and organic results just beneath. With this, on mobile, negative feedback would be already below the fold. Another example for when you would want to bid on your brand terms is during the testing of your tone of voice or new messaging. Running A/B tests on brand campaigns would help execute this.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

It is important to remember that managing your brand campaigns on Google Ads is much easier when you keep your marketing in-house or have a full-service digital agency supporting your efforts. That one agency can work on a strategy, monitor if any competitors are bidding, and where you are in terms of rankings for organic. Whereas if you choose one agency to do your PPC and another to do your SEO – then the cooperation between channels will be much more challenging.

At MGWW, we provide digital strategy across services. We use cross-channel strategies and consider every product and service our clients offer on a case-by-case basis. We use tools and scripts to monitor and manage rankings, but we look at our marketing results through a full-funnel strategy, as perhaps, should you.

If you would like to learn more about our operations and services, feel free to reach out and contact us!