Why advertisers should bid on brand terms on Paid Search

OVERVIEW & PURPOSE

Often, advertisers wonder what the value-add is of bidding on brand terms in Paid Search. Are you wasting money paying for brand traffic that would otherwise find you through organic avenues? And what other value is there for bidding on branded terms beyond performance? Our team took a deep dive into these questions to shine some light on the many benefits for bidding on brand terms on Paid Search.

DEFEND AGAINST COMPETITORS

It’s no secret that your competitors are just as hungry for quality leads and traffic as you are, so it can’t be a surprise that they may be bidding on your brand terms to achieve their goals. The last thing you want is for the leads you’ve paid good money for through awareness drivers like Facebook and Programmatic Display to Google your property and see your biggest competitors taking up the top spots on the search engines results page (SERP). Ensuring you’re bidding on brand terms will secure you that top spot you deserve at a low price.

COMPETITOR INSIGHTS

Bidding on brand terms gives you data on your competitors through Google’s Auction Insights. This tool lets you see who else is bidding on your brand terms, how often they show up next to (or above) your ads, and how aggressively they are going after your brand terms. If you don’t bid on your brand terms, then you sadly cannot use this tool and miss out on these valuable insights.

CONTROL MESSAGING

Running ads for your brand terms gives you full control of your messaging from top to bottom. Have an unbeatable special that sets you apart from the competition? Run it in your ad headline and you’ll be sure to have leads running to your site in no time! Your ad extensions are a great place to highlight your incredible location, your spacious floorplans, your unmatched amenities, all while dominating the results page. It’s truly a win win for you.

OWN THE RESULTS PAGE

Bidding on brand terms and running organic efforts is a match made in heaven, since it allows you to completely monopolize the results page. Through paid search, you can run Google Ad Extensions, which allows you to maximize the amount of space your ads take up and provides users with even more relevant information. Dominating the results page is fantastic on desktops, but it is even more imperative on mobile, where space above the fold is limited and driving calls to a property is invaluable. 

ILS TRAFFIC

You may be thinking driving traffic to your apartments.com listing can only do you good since you’re paying big bucks for a Diamond package, right? Wrong. Sending prospects to apartments.com from a Google search of your brand is a recipe for disaster – they now have easy access to hundreds of competitors on one site. If someone is Googling your brand name, the last thing you want is for them to go anywhere other than your website. That’s why taking up as much of the results page with your ads and organic content helps funnel traffic to you and you alone.

INEXPENSIVE & HIGH-QUALITY TRAFFIC

Brand traffic is inexpensive and highly relevant. Due to the hyper-relevancy of your brand terms, Google lets you have cheap CPCs, while still showing up at the top of the SERP. Additionally, users searching for your brand terms are extremely high-quality. They have done their research and are already familiar with your brand! The risk of not bidding on brand terms is that you won’t show up when a user searches for you or that a competitor might be bidding on your terms and showing up at the top of the SERP. This can result in someone making it all the way down the funnel, and then ultimately converting on a competitor term.

CASE STUDY & FINDINGS

There are a lot of reasons why bidding on brand terms is a great idea, but if you still need a bit more convincing, then take a look at the data below. In this scenario, we looked at what happened in an account 2 weeks after pausing down brand terms and the results speak for themselves.

Despite popular belief, organic and direct did not pick up the lost brand traffic. In fact, users dropped by 342 and sessions dropped by 445, with this loss in traffic ultimately leading to us missing out on form fills and potential leads.

CONCLUSION & NEXT STEPS

Clearly bidding on your brand terms provides a lot of value in your paid search strategy, but seeing the data behind the ideas always helps solidify what we already know. Bidding on brand terms is the key to dominating your results page and discouraging your competitors from swooping in on your hard-earned leads.  

To fully understand the impacts of bidding on brand terms, we want to investigate more cases like the one above to complete a more comprehensive analysis.