Why bid on your own brand terms?

It seems counter intuitive to bid on terms that represent your own brand for search network campaigns on AdWords & Bing.  However, there are definitely good reasons to do so – here’s a list:

1. The good quality score you’ll get for keywords & ads that reference your brand, given that the ads land on a web site that is highly relevant to your brand, rubs off on your entire account & helps boost overall quality score.  And – the high quality score for brand terms means their cost per click should be low.
2. Presenting ads for searches on your brand terms gives you control of the top search results listing in the event that competitors are targeting your brand keywords as well.  Happens all the time.
3. Google is no longer passing the related search query when an organic search results link is clicked – organic keywords show as “(not provided)” in all web analytics tools.  But – assuming you are importing data from AdWords into your web analytics tool – Google does provide the keyword matched for a paid ad click.  So – for a paid ad click we still know in your web analytics reporting whether or not the visitor searched Google using a brand term. This data gives us valuable info about how advertising is impacting brand searches, and also allows us to treat site visitors that already know our brand differently should we choose to. It also allows us to add them to a remarketing audience list of those that know the brand for use with AdWords remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) campaigns (e.g., raise bids on non-brand search terms, but only for users on the “already know our brand” remarketing audience list).
4. Allows us to present custom text ad copy for inexpensive brand term searches relative to current marketing initiatives – like an ad that references your brand’s participation in an industry trade show or event (e.g., “Come visit us at SXSW”).  And – we also have much greater control over site links under ads to drive folks to different focus content per near term initiatives.
5. Having both organic and paid ad links present in search results increases incremental clicks – more than if only the organic links were present.  This is true even for brand keywords.  Read the related study, “Impact Of Ranking Of Organic Search Results On The Incrementality Of Search Ads“.