Q: Should I bid on my brand name in Google Search?
My name is Andrea Hamilton, Senior Client Strategist here at MoreVisibility.
Recently I’ve been asked Why should I bid on my brand name in Google Search?
This is one of those questions that always come up when we are developing paid search strategies and it has come up recently with a handful of my clients who are new to digital. I thought this would be a good time to talk about this hot topic.
In short, our answer is yes and there several good reasons why bidding on your brand name makes dollars and sense for your brand. For the purposes of this video, I will give you (4) reasons why you should bid on your brand name.
- Control the messaging:
Paid search provides you with a unique opportunity to customize the message to your target audience based on the search query. With paid search you can push unique value propositions in the ad copy, include ad extensions, like click to call, sitelinks, call-out extensions and things that you cannot do or control with a organic search results.Your messaging and the ability to control what you want your target audience to know about your brand is an important feature you want to be able to leverage. It cannot be leveraged from an organic search result. - Control the search engine results page (SERP) when it comes to your brand:
You may be saying, but I’m #1 organically. Great, however, just because you have the best organic result today doesn’t mean that you’ll be found when users are looking for you. If they encounter your competitor at the top of the SERP, you may not get the click.Paid ads sit above organic results. If you aren’t at the top, you run the risk of losing out to a competitor.We often refer to the SERP as real estate. The goal is to occupy as much space at the top of the search engine results page as possible. The more room you take up, leaves less room for your competitors to divert consumer clicks. - Competition:
Sometimes, you may have competitors bid on your brand name with the effort to steal your traffic and customers. If you don’t bid on your own brand name, your competitor’s paid ads will be shown above your organic listings. This could potentially decrease the CTR for your listings, which means less traffic. By bidding on your brand name, you can not only own your brand SERP by showing on top of the search result, and also make the clicks more expensive for your competitors as they will have to bid higher to outrank you. - Increase your click through rate and receive incremental traffic: Don’t take my word for it. Google conducted a study back in 2011 called the Search Ads Pause Study. What they found was that on average, the incremental ad clicks percentage is 89%. This means that a full 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. To put it simply, running paid search ads increases the CTR for your listings (including organic listings), and give you as much as 89% incremental clicks.
In our experience, we’ve found that this strategy is effective and leads to increase traffic, engagement and sales/leads for the lionshare of clients.
If you’re still not convinced this strategy makes sense for you, test it. We’re huge proponents of testing here at MoreVisibility. Pause your brand campaign and examine what happens to your overall site traffic, conversion rates and site engagement. You’ll be able to determine how valuable this traffic is after a short period without it. At the end of the day, paid search provides you with measurable results for your evaluation.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to your client strategist or if you’re not a client, you can contact us at info@morevisibility.com.
