Before diving deep into pay per click advertising I would often get questions about campaigns from my clients who had contacted me to do unrelated things like website builds or content strategy. I could never really comment on PPC having very little experience with it but I always heard horror stories and one I often hear about is how agencies bid on a client’s brand name. Not knowing much about that it came off as a scammy way to “show results”. A few years later I have a different mindset on this strategy that I have wanted to write about for a while, there’s a lot of resources online that get this subject wrong.
What Is Branded Bidding?
If you made it this far im sure you already know what branded bidding is but for the sake of my Google search results let’s break it down. Branded bidding is building campaigns around your brand name or products, if you are running a campaign for Ikea then building a branded campaign is bidding on keywords relating to Ikea and your products at Ikea.
4 Reason to Bid On Branded Search Terms
Let’s be honest, 90% of companies out there can easily rank for their brand name and even some of their products. So why bother wasting money on this ? There are several good reasons to do this, and if you are not doing it blindly it can be useful for some of the below reasons.
1. Control the message
Being able to show off promotional info, show location details or click to call information guaranteed at the top of your SERPs is very helpful rather than relying on your organic listing. Identify Competitors – Allocating a small amount of your budget on a fixed bid campaign for your brand can help give insight on if a competitor starts bidding on your brand and when a new company is entering the market.
2.A/B Testing
Using your branded campaigns can be a great way to test landing pages you could not easily do with organic results. Being able to test things like location pages, brand sales pages and other content via controlled paid traffic.
3. Baseline
Getting a baseline of what an informed, brand loyal customer conversion rate is who is coming via your branded campaign vs an uninformed customer can be helpful.
4. More Complex Funnels
Branded campaigns can also allow you to focus on more complex retargeting approaches to capture people who searched your brand but did not convert and likely went somewhere else. These people should be a little higher value vs general site visitors.
Before attempting a branded campaign
To many people run branded campaigns alongside their primary campaigns and focus on the numbers Google spits out for attribution. This is what scammy PPC agencies do in order to make their campaigns look incredibly successful with an incredible ROAS.
For branded campaigns, you have to know your numbers and the lift over your organic conversion rate to know if your campaign is a success. If the majority of your branded traffic would have converted organically, then your branded campaign was a waste unless you keep your bidding extremely low and the campaign spend a small portion of your overall campaign. If you are already in the first position in your SERPs on branded terms you will likely see low CPA and great ROAS but you are cannibalizing your organic traffic.
Until you can cleanly separate your traffic by branded vs. unbranded. vs organic, clearly understand the new customer vs. returning customer mix of each, and then put a LTV on that customer – you can’t really start modeling out your spend to be driving total company ROI – not just media-attributed results.
