Why Spend Money On Your Brand Terms

They think because they have a very unique name or their organic results show, there is no reason to spend money on their brand keywords.

A lot of clients always ask why should they spend money on their own brand term? They think because they have a very unique name or their organic results show up at the top that there is no reason to spend money on their branded keywords. This is significantly untrue, and if you are not spending money on your brand you are losing out on a lot of opportunities. PPC brand bidding drives meaningful revenue, drives quality traffic and clicks, and protects your name.

Branded spend is the quickest win you can provide yourself and your company. It provides a huge amount of real estate on search engines at a cheap cost. It makes sure you are there when it’s most important for your customers to find you. Ad extensions on your branded ads can even help customers to purchase more than what they had planned. Imagine a moment in which a customer is trying to find your brand because they heard about it somewhere and you were nowhere to be found, that’s money lost. Instead imagine spending 0.10 cents a click or another minimal cost when comparing to non-branded, to make sure you land that customer every time? Branded spend is always worth it in the end.

Besides the more obvious benefits to brand spend there is also the hidden pros. Many times your competitors can be bidding on your brand and advertising using your name in their ad copy. This is detrimental to you and will drive your cost of advertising up. Many search engines forbid the use of your brand terms being used in someone else’s ad copy. To make sure this doesn’t happen you need to file the rights you have (usually a patent) with Google, Bing, or whatever search engine you are on, which will then alert the engine to any infringement on your brand that may be happening.

One case study found that when you stop other brands from using your brand name in their headline you could decrease brand CPCs, increase clicks, and cut costs in half. Besides cutting down on others using your brand name, generally since it’s your brand, engines will reward you with high quality scores for your keywords since they are the most relevant to your landing page. Higher quality scores means lower CPCs, so if you are just starting out spending on your brand, start low!

General trends have been showing Branded CPCs increasing year over year and spend on branded terms increasing significantly in 2016. Advertisers are clearly placing more value on their branded searches.

In my experience branded spend is a MUST in PPC advertising. We don’t start advertising for anyone without a branded campaign on a few different match types. Even if the brand is new to the market or has an obscure name, we always want to make sure that we capture the people who do know about it or are looking to find more information about the service/product.

The key takeaways after learning this should be to get familiar with engines’ rules on brand infringement, monitor your branded keyword activity, and take action on infringers. Oh and if you haven’t built a branded campaign yet, you should go ahead and get started.