Have you considered bidding on your brand? Do you know the risks of doing it and the benefits? This article will go over what considerations you need to make before you decide to do it and questions you should ask yourself to learn if it’s the right move for your business.
Should I bid on my own brand?
This is often a hot topic among our customers, and many think that it is unnecessary to spend money to bid on their brand, and as many think it’s obvious that you should buy your brand.
As a policy, we recommend that you buy your brand, but with a budget cap that is a maximum of 10% of your total budget. Most of the time, the budget for your own branded keywords will be much smaller, but it depends on your total budget.
Pros and cons with bidding on your brand
There are, of course, some pros and some cons, but the only con that matters is the cost. If you are fine with that, there are a few nice upsides to bidding on your brand
Keyword-mining
- Buying the keywords gives you the possibility to mine for other keywords. Often, we see misspellings of your brand and parts of phrases that are useful to add. For example “brand “+” geographical location, or “brand” +” category name”.
- There are relatively few variations of brand keywords, so with keyword mining, it doesn’t take long to get +99% exact matches.
It’s cheap
- With a Quality Score that should be near 10 for all brand keywords, most clicks on exact matches and expensive for your competition to bid on it’s extremely cheap.
Control over landing pages
- The search for your brand name will always link to your front page in SEO, but is that where you have the best probability of conversion? If a user previously has searched for a certain category, wouldn’t it be better to send that user to that category, product page, or somewhere where we know there is a higher probability of conversion.
Longtail brand
- You might be on top of the organic search term “brand” but might not be at the top if someone searches for “brand” + “keyword2”.
Blocking competition
- Since Google Ads is an auction, even if your competition is not relevant at all when bidding on your brand keyword, it becomes even more expensive if you (as the brand owner) is competing.
Conclusion
- Bidding on your brand is a cheap way to get information, control, and users from the lower funnel, and if you don’t spend too much, it’s highly recommended. With the small parentheses, as with all data, you need to take care of the information you are gathering. Adding the keywords you are mining, directing the ads to the URLs, and doing something with the user data you gather.
