“I rank organically for my brand terms. Why would I pay for ads on them?” How many times have you heard this? Or said it? Advertising on brand terms seems to be an ongoing discussion that still hasn’t been settled. So, I’m going to try to settle it now. At first, the argument that you don’t need to buy ads for your brand if you rank organically makes sense. Why would you purposely buy ads that will (generally) be displayed above your organic positions and pay for clicks on keywords that you could get free clicks on? Why would you spend time and money managing a campaign with your brand keywords when you have organic positions for them? But is this really true? Are you wasting your money on brand ads when you have organic positions? I’m going to convince you the answer is no. You should buy brand keywords, regardless of how strong your organic positions are. Here’s why…. Ads and organic positions have a symbiotic relationship. Many people think that paying for clicks on ads is a waste of money if they have an organic position on the keyword. But, while there’s no definitive case study on this, anecdotal evidence and observations of BlueGlass client statistics indicate that having PPC ads in combination with organic positions can actually increase sales 15 to 40%. This is hard to test due to all of the variables involved but I’ve personally experienced dramatic decreases in organic brand sales when brand PPC ads were turned off. The combination of ads and organic positions increases brand trust. Whether it is a conscious reaction or not, when users see organic positions and ads for the same domain, they have a higher level of trust for the brand. If the user is researching your brand and your competitors and you are able to influence their decision simply by having an ad on your brand, why wouldn’t you? Brand PPC campaigns can be useful for SEO keyword research. By buying broad match brand terms and allowing Google to match your ads to keywords it thinks are related, you can use your brand campaigns to see how potential customers think of your brand and to find new keywords for organic optimization. For instance, you may see that people frequently misspell your brand in a specific way which you do not rank organically for. You may want to try to rank organically for this misspelling. Or, you may just create an ad group with common misspellings to capture traffic from the misguided consumers. Either way, you have found an opportunity to capture targeted traffic that you would have missed without running the brand ads. PPC ad campaigns can be used to test messaging without affecting SEO efforts. You can quickly test various messaging in PPC ads to see which convert the best. You don’t have this luxury with SEO. You don’t want to change your page titles every few days to see what gets the best CTR and conversion rate. A brand PPC campaign is a great place to test messaging and special offers before making changes to your website. Your competitors are going to advertise on your brand. Unless you have a trademarked brand and have jumped through the hoops to prevent competitors from running on your brand (do that by the way), your competitors are going to run ads on your brand to try to poach customers. If you are unable to prevent them from running their ads, the least you can do is make sure you are there too. Brand keywords tend to have higher quality scores. Having high quality score keywords in your account is beneficial to your account as a whole. Adding a brand campaign is generally an easy way to get some high quality score keywords in your account which may give a small boost to the performance of your other keywords, as long as you are properly managing your campaigns. I have yet to see a client that did not benefit from advertising on their brand terms in some fashion. At the very least you should test it and see if it works for you. I bet it will!
Should You Buy PPC Ads for Your Brand Keywords?
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Great article Pamela – I’d add that in addition to all these benefits, advertising on branded terms usually just isn’t all that expensive. A great quality score + low competition means very cheap clicks. If there is competition – it’s just that much more important to be advertising, and your quality score/click cost should be much lower than your competitors. Hopefully your article pushes this a bit closer to a standard best practice.
Excellent points Chris!
However, you may find that if your branded search landscape is not competitive. In this situation you may find that the spend may actually prove higher ROI if spent on other phrases in the campaign. This is why it is key to test everything. In our campaign, while we loose a small amount of overall revenue tied to specific brand phrases, we actually bring in more overall revenue by stopping spend on higher traffic branded phrases and spending that spend on other non-branded phrases. I believe this is caused from the lack of competition for out branded specific phrases, allowing our natural results to maintain strong CTR.
Jeff – I assume you have your brand trademarked and blocked from other advertisers using it as a keyword, which would change the scenario. Additionally, Petco is a large brand that has a lot of organic coverage. So, adding ads to that mix would probably just add another click point that wouldn’t necessarily increase conversion since you are not competing for space. So I can see how in your situation it may not make sense to advertise on all brand keywords (though I wouldn’t count them all out).
You are right, testing is key. Brand keywords may not work for every business but they shouldn’t avoid advertising on them without proper testing.
Thank you for the interesting analysis Pamela.
In the case of my company, competitors are bidding high on our brand name because we are one of the main brands in the business.
For this reason, we rely on organic results for brand searches, and use Adwords for other important generic keywords.
To target our brand name, I would expect to be forced to use a significant part of Adwords budget in spite of other important generic keywords.
What do you think about this kind of situation?
As you recommend, I will do some additional testing.
Dario – You’re definitely in a tough spot with a brand name like that. I would recommend trying exact match for your brand and some phrase or broad match misspellings that you may not be ranking for. Set things like “japanese cars” as negatives (for the brand campaign only). Either your competitors aren’t specifically bidding on [japanese vehicles] or they haven’t done a good job of matching their ad titles and text to the keywords. So, if you create an ad group for just [japanese vehicles] and use that in your ad title plus good CTA ad text you should be able to dominate CTR on that search. Ideally over the long run, if your brand is the best match for the searches, your CTR will be high and your quality score will increase, eventually making it less expensive for you to advertise.
Unfortunately for some brands with broad terms as the name, brand advertising can be tricky. But, with use of match types and negatives, if you are really a good match for the searches (and I hope you are if that’s your brand!) you can come out on top. Test with a small budget on the brand campaign to make sure you don’t spend too much money while you dial in what works and what doesn’t.
Pamela – Thank you very much, I see the point: the difficult in our case is that our brand name blends with the generic searches, ours and of the competition.
I will do some testing and try to isolate the brand search as much as possible using negatives and exact matches. I will try to see if we can reach a good balance in budget spending for the branded and not branded terms. Thank you!
I’d love to hear how it turns out for you if you want to keep me posted.
Hello Pamela,
I have been doing some tests with a limited set of keywords: basically few versions of our brand name and exact match.
In this test the results were not really positive: approximately 75% of the visitors who clicked the ads were returning customers with a conversion rate slightly lower than usual.
CPC of the branded keywords also was more expensive than that of the non-branded ones.
The result was a higher than average CPA.
In our case, I think that the returning customers where using the paid ads like another entrance to take a look at the products available.
With a limited budget, I think it is better for us to focus only on the non-branded keywords that have a lower CPA.. more orders, more sales.
What do you think?
Hi Dario – I definitely think you should spend your money where you get the most return. Without looking at your stats I can’t make a call on the results of this test but I would say you are definitely in a tough position with that brand name. With a limited budget I would definitely focus on what has proven a good return on ad spend.
I should have talked to you about this earlier. I’m in that group that does not want to spend on my brand term but you make convincing points. Time to get the dust off the PPC book and get back to it.
It’s definitely worth a try Mike. Test it out for a bit and see what happens with organic and PPC conversions. Use the ad space to mention something you can’t in your ad text to reassure them that you’re the chiropractor they’re looking for (jedi mind trick!). If you need any help let me know!
All the big brands like Apple and Dell run PPC on their brand names. Its the best and cheapest form of advertising you can do. It also tends to push any negative reviews or other unwanted stories about your company or competitors below the fold.
Great points Dave. It is an opportunity to reinforce your brand message to people who are already “warmed up” to the idea of your brand or who are interested in it.
At the moment we are making advertising only on branded keywords as a test because we saw that 90% of our conversions came from them and at a fraction of the cost of the others keywords we were bidding for. One thing that we noticed however is that the large majority of people that click on our paid search results are already actual users of our website and obviously rather than open a new account, they just use that landing page to login or go to the homepage. We are considering removing all these links that point to pages outside the signup funnel which would be optimal, but we would be pissing off almost 3/4 of the users that land on that page by doing that. Kind of a curious and messy situation.
Hi Ivan – I wouldn’t recommend doing something that would annoy 3/4 of the people that land on the page since happy users are the goal. Do you have strong organic positions for your brand? If so you may want to see if there are individual keywords that current users are using that new prospects aren’t using and stop advertising on those specific keywords, thereby focusing your budget on the keywords that new prospects use. Make sure the titles for your pages that rank organically are appealing for click throughs by current users (without hurting your rankings). You want to optimize page titles for CTR just like you would ads. Also you could try different ad text that appeals to new prospects but not to current users. For instance push “learn about” and “sign up for” if you aren’t already.
I’d love to know if those ideas help you at all if you want to keep me updated.
Thanks!