There are so many advertisers who have contributed to the concept of bidding on brand terms. The idea has been a huge hit.
Still and all, there are people who question the effectiveness of it. They are still in doubts about the practice and its incrementality. And, they believe that the paid ads are going to chew on the organic traffic and gobble it up, whole.
To combat them, bidding crusaders point out how search ads are responsible for almost 89% of the traffic. Well, this is undoubtedly a heated debate. As of now, let’s participate for the motion and have a discussion.
What’s a ‘Brand Keyword,’ in the first place?
Google ‘Lee & Nee Softwares (Exports) Limited.’ Well, that’s the Brand Keyword for our site. Yes, these search terms are the queries you put in the Google search box to look for a company’s website or services directly.
Interestingly, these terms also include the misspelled URLs of websites! Who, do you think, corrects them? Of course, the Google Instant Feature, who else?
Now, the question is, why bid on these keywords?
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- Reason #1: Because it’s cheap.
Did you know that branded keywords have low Cost Per Click (CPC) than most generic search terms? That’s because such keywords always have higher Click-Through Rates (CTR). Their Quality Score, too, is high.
It’s more cost-effective to bid on brand names because of their low CPC. The prices are reliant on the Quality Score, which is determined based on two more factors apart from CTR. These factors include Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience.
Because no other Ad or landing page is as relevant as that suggested by the brand name, it naturally achieves the top marks. Hence, the bidding is not just affordable, but effective too.
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- Reason #2: Because you could keep ahead of your competitors.
No matter how much you hate the idea of bidding on your brand name, deep down inside, you know someone else is surely doing it. Would you like to lose to your competitors or invest some money in the practice instead? Well, it’s called defensive brand bidding.
Further, did you know that most people click the top results in Google search out of sheer instinct? 40% of them are not even aware that these are paid ads. They believe, these are the best search results shown and take them to be authoritative links. You must take advantage of this fact.
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- Reason #3: Because it’s going to boost your traffic.
The total traffic and number of clicks is raised when paid ads and organic links are present together. This fact needs no proof. It is self explanatory. In other words, if you desire the maximum clicks on your site, it is better to bid on your own brand keywords.
In case the ads are missing, the traffic will be 100% driven from organic links. However, when ads are present, the clicks from organic results will drop for sure, but the total clicks on the website will increase.
According to Google, 50% of traffic coming from ads is incremental in nature. The moment the ad campaign is halted, the traffic stops and there’s no way this can be recovered using organic means.
Things to consider while bidding on brand keywords:
You need to have an exclusive campaign for the brand, so that the effect of it can be told apart from that of the Google AdWords campaign. In case you fail to do this, you will notice that the brand ads are performing exceptionally well – a result which may be dubious.
Yet again, you must remember that people who look for a brand directly in search engines often lead to conversions. So, when traffic moves from organic to paid, it may seem as if the organic portion producing quality. This need not be true.
Bidding on brand definitely pays off if you know how to do it right. It’s a bit of luck that advertisers have access to such a huge heap of data. Isn’t decision-making becoming smarter? Yes, and this is why you should follow the practice today. We, at LNSEL are definitely for it.
