At first glance, it could seem foolish to spend money on ads for our own brand in Google AdWords when we actually appear first and “free” with our organic results. Are we just stealing clicks from ourselves, and paying for it too?
Should we pay to push our brand keywords in AdWords?
Despite this initial thought that we have all had at some point, by pushing our brand terms in PPC we could get a really strong ROI that perhaps you never expected, and you will quickly start to love brand bidding.
So, the answer is a strong “yes” in virtually all cases, especially when we have strong competition. The reasons can be summarised by these 4 points.
Dominate your Google results page
We may want to fill the first page of Google (or another Search Engine) with our brands when someone is searching for our brand or a term that contains our brand name. Brand ads is one way we can achieve this, apart from the organic results, Social Media pages, review sites… and, as we are going to see, brand ads are the ones we have the most control over.
They look great and build trust
Capturing the first page of Google is such a good presentation card for our brand and will probably impress our target. Thus, we increase the chances of getting the “click”
We will push our competitors down
We will manage to get the majority of all the clicks from the queries containing our brand terms if our competitors do not remain in our territory.
Customise the Search Results and increase the performance
We can control our messaging with the organic results too by doing SEO, but Paid Search ads provide a wide and easy-to-manage range of enhancing features such as showing our (clickable) phone number, highlighting our USPs or our products, showing our rating score…
Moreover, the title and snippet are quick and easy to change, so, we could adapt them to a specific and temporary offer or circumstance, modify and test our Call to Action, and we will not have to wait to be indexed by Google like with the organic results.
As a result, we could have two different snippets with different messages to impact our audience.
Thus, with all of these powerful features available to personalise our ads, and the possibility of “owning” the top positions of the results page (which is going to drive us most of the clicks for every query) we could definitely improve our performance.
Test landing pages
Paid branded traffic brings you a valuable way to try different landing pages.
Brand bids are usually very cheap (and worth it)
As the competition is usually low and we will easily get a high-Quality Score with our Keywords (what determines the cost per click in AdWords), the cost-per-click should be low too. Having this really high-Quality Score, we would have an advantage in the case of our competitors bidding on our brand.
Additionally, those clicks would be even cheaper if they lead the user to a conversion, and we all know that people who are searching for a brand are more likely to convert.
Know how our target audience search for us
Search ads are more interesting, in terms of Keyword collection than organic results. They will bring us a really valuable amount of keywords that will definitely help us understand the performance of our brand traffic and to understand how our audience search for our brand and products or even discover trends and patterns in their queries.
Will you keep it in mind for your Digital Strategy?
Juan Álvarez
