If you’ve spent any amount of time working with paid ads, you’ll most likely have come across the pros and cons of paying for branded terms. There’s no right or wrong opinion on branded keywords, as each business has its own needs, competitors and budget.
On the fence about bidding for your business’s branded keywords? Here’s 5 reasons why you should seriously consider it.
- Higher quality score
Branded keywords naturally receive more clicks as most of the time the searcher is typing in your business address to visit your website. As a result, this increases your campaign’s quality score and pushes up all other keywords for that campaign, potentially knocking your competitors even lower in the rankings.
On the flip side, you do pay for clicks which you may have received originally.
- Push bad reviews off the first page
Whether a competitor has left a negative comment about your website or a blogger has written an unfavourable review which ranks on the first page of Google, bidding for your branded keywords sinks such reviews lower in the searchers ensuring they receive less attention.
AWeber is the perfect example of this, their advert and their organic listing covers almost the whole screen:
- You get more targeted traffic
According to a Google study taken in 2011, after pausing 400 ads on advertisers’ accounts, on average each business saw an 89% decrease in traffic. The study was for all keywords not just branded, but it does cement the fact that bidding for relevant keywords, even branded will bring more traffic to your website.
Bing Ads ran their own test focusing on branded keywords and found that by ranking #1 organically and targeting branded keyword increased click-throughs by 32%.
Tailor your brand message
With paid ads you have complete control over what’s being served to prospects. When ranking organically, even if you do edit your meta description and use the right tags, it’s ultimately up to Google to decide what they want to show, you do not have the final say.
Using paid ads, you can write what you like, place ad extensions and test various copies to see which messages convert best. It can be a hassle to continually change your website’s meta data several times a year based on the offer you currently have or to make content more seasonal, with paid search it only takes two seconds and the changes are made instantly.
When dealing with organic searchers, you must wait for Google to crawl your website before your changes are reflected in their search listings. This can sometimes take weeks.
- You will generate more sales
Whether people bid on their branded keywords or not, most will agree that bidding on them will almost always provide you with more business.
For example, if you do any kind of offline marketing, be that handing out flyers, doing radio shows or events, when you generate offline awareness for your business most will jump on the Internet and search for your business’s name. If you don’t bid for your branded keyword, even losing 1% of all traffic to a competitor can end up very costly in the long-run.
The bottom line
The debate of whether you should or shouldn’t bid on branded keywords will probably never be settled. Even if a business doesn’t directly generate sales from bidding on branded keywords, it will aid other areas of their marketing plan such as creating more awareness and branding.
Do you bid for your branded keywords?
Nick Bridges
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1 Comment
James Oliver
February 10, 2017To bid or not to bid on brand terms depends on the objective of an advertiser.
Lots of companies might rightly ask, if they’re a brand leader with a well-established brand, a well-optimized site and an established ranking as number one or two on the first page of Google, then why would they need to spend thousands every month for the privilege of an ad above their organic listing?
We believe that AdWords is there to complement the investment that you make into your website, in terms of its content. That content itself provides a long-term investment that can benefit your business for years into the future, not just right here and now. Internet marketing is much more than just purchasing AdWords. The decision to purchase brand terms should be constantly reviewed and the benefits qualified for each individual business in turn.