Paid search advertising has many arms.
Marketers spend years crafting strategies to drive results through Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and more.
Of these many strategies adopted by brands and agencies, in my experience over the last 15 years, one topic that sits across every paid search strategy is brand bidding.
What Is Brand Bidding?
Brand bidding, in its truest form, relates to targeting keywords that relate to your (or your clients) business.
For example:
Screenshot for search for [new balance], Google, November 2024The most common keyword marketers will include in their strategy is the company name. But depending on search demand, there may be additional keywords that are included.
Such as:
Brand keyword + product.
Brand keyword + ‘address’.
Brand keyword + ‘customer service’.
Brand keyword + ‘returns’.
There is also an element of brand bidding focused on products/services that may not contain the company name.
Think Apple and the “iPhone” or Converse and the “Chuck Taylor.” These terms are most certainly brand keywords, just without the company name.
From a tactical standpoint, whether brands bid on their keywords or not is a decision made between the stakeholders involved.
However, since Google Ads was birthed in October 2000, this topic has been very controversial for several reasons.
Why Is Brand Bidding A Controversial Topic?
The controversy is rooted in a question that many brands or agencies will likely have been asked or have asked themselves, “Why should we pay for traffic that we can get for free through organic?”
This is a completely justified perspective on brand bidding, and if brands could guarantee that the Google search engine results page (SERP) would serve a single organic result – and no competitor ads when a brand term is searched – it would make the decision for and against much more straightforward.
However, times have changed, as have Google Ads campaign types and the way in which the SERP is delivered and used by searchers.
Brand bidding should be treated on a case-by-case basis, considering as many situational factors as possible, such as:
Competition.
Market penetration.
Keyword contextuality (a common case being a high volume generic keyword as part of your company name, e.g., “The Next Day Flower Company”).
Search demand.
Resellers.
Budgets.
Organic rankings.
It’s not always clear which path to take, but there are a host of reasons for and against.
What Are The Benefits Of Brand Bidding?
Strengthened Visibility
Serving a branded text ad on the SERP alongside your organic listings provides an additional link for searchers to click through to your site.
Let’s say you rank position one organically for your company name, have the knowledge panel displaying your company information, a text ad serving sitelinks alongside your review rating, and your company telephone number. The real estate you are maximizing on the SERP will serve as an authority for your brand.
Brand Protection
Being on the receiving end of competitor bidding is a common reason for marketers and agencies to activate their own brand campaigns.
Brands are free to bid on competitor company names and/or related keywords across Google, Bing, etc. This is a common strategy used by brands and agencies worldwide.
There are restrictions that forbid brands from including trademarked company names within ad copy, but outside of this, brands have free reign.
In my experience, there are a few reasons (among others) for why brands adopt this strategy:
Reactiveness – when a brand spots a competitor bidding on their brand terms to get their brand back to position one as soon as possible.
Exploration to see whether the results-driven are in line with KPIs and if the incremental value is worthwhile.
Necessity as competitor bidding is common practice, and bidding on a brand is a requirement to ensure users can find your brand immediately in a busy SERP.
Messaging And Control
The organic listing served for brand queries contains a customizable title tag and meta description.
However, Google’s guidelines state that it will only use this if it is accurate and will often rewrite these and serve organic sitelinks.
By serving a branded search ad, the advertiser is given complete control over the messaging.
This is useful in many scenarios:
Poor organic rankings (e.g., not serving an organic listing for branded search, wrong page ranking above the homepage).
To instantly serve bespoke messaging for your branded ads (e.g., promotions, updates).
Combatting rewritten title tags and/or meta descriptions.
Creating bespoke sitelinks to direct users to different landing pages.
Click Costs
Context aside, brand cost-per-click (CPC) is likely cheaper than non-brand (generic keywords) as there is less competition, and your quality score will be strong.
Each industry (market and vertical) will have a different scenario in terms of how much a branded click costs.
Take Nike, for example. Its brand terms will be incredibly competitive as resellers, marketplaces, and affiliates will serve ads on the company name. However, a small ecommerce store might not have anyone bidding on its brand name.
With the typically cheaper click costs, bidding on branded keywords can be seen as a cost-effective strategy, but all other factors must be considered – a key one being the impact on organic performance.
Incrementality
This refers to driving better results overall by bidding on branded keywords than you would without, and is a very hot topic in PPC.
As with almost all arguments for and against brand bidding, the incremental gains driven through this strategy differ by brand.
Among other methods, turn-off experiments are common practice.
This is where marketers pause brand bidding for a treatment group while maintaining visibility for the control group to observe the impact of bidding on branded keywords.
Studies have shown that turning off brand campaigns can result in lower overall performance versus having brand ads live.
Others have shown barely any impact overall, with organic picking up the sales or leads that would have been driven through ads.
What is the best way to find out? Give it a test.
What Are The Drawbacks Of Brand Bidding?
Budget
Context plays a huge role (size of business, level of demand, market, etc.).