A very frequently asked question that many people entering the Paid Search world have.
Should I spend money on my own brand terms?
There are so many businesses who are not bidding on their own brand terms. Why? Because they want to go after the most searched for keywords, and then assume the user will land on their page. Data shows you how beneficial it is to bid on your brand terms. It’s an efficient way to maintain valuable consumers, increase your traffic, and get a higher CTR and quality score.
[mkdf_blockquote text=” While advertisers can analyze fluctuations in their own performance as they choose to bid or not to bid on their own brand terms, they have little insight on how this influences the actions of others. ” title_tag=”h2″ width=””] Connie Woo
The answer is you should DEFINITELY bid on your own brand terms! Here are 3 main reasons why:
1. Your competitors are doing it
This is very common. Your main competitors may actually bid your brand name, which means that if you have people searching for your business specifically, they could be stealing that organic traffic interested specifically in your business. This is the worst type of traffic to lose! These people know your name for some reason, and they are searching for YOUR business. If you are not the first one to pop up, and they end up in your competitors’ hands, then you’re losing valuable organic traffic.
As you can see when you type “Mercedes” on Google the top 3 ads are: first from Mercedes itself, then two of their competitors who are bidding on their brand term. Imagine if Mercedes didn’t bid on their own brand term, then all of this organic traffic would go directly to their competitors.
2. It will bring you more traffic
According to a study done by Bing, bidding your own brand term will bring you more traffic. Their study showed that businesses ranking #1 for both organic and paid search, had a click yield of 88% vs. a click yield of 56% for companies with only branded terms.
That being said, when businesses did not use brand terms click yield went down to 56%. Another critical aspect of the study is that click yield increased a lot on competitors’ ads when the businesses did not use their own brand terms. The study proves that when you bid on your own brand terms, your traffic in total should go up.
When a business ranks #1 for both paid search and organic search, they are getting an average of 32% more clicks. That’s a huge advantage!
3. Low Cost Per Click
Something advertisers don’t check, or take into consideration is that the cost per click for brand terms is very cheap compared to most other keywords.
It is a lot cheaper than your average CPC, and though a lot of these people could have found you without ads, the results show that it is still very important for you to use your branded terms. It’s cost effective when you consider traffic increase and making sure your valuable, interested consumers, don’t land on your competitors’ websites.
Remember that apart of your branded terms being cheap and powerful in increasing traffic, they will also give you a higher CTR (Click-Through-Rate) and Quality Score, helping your ads rank high. These people are already interested in your product, so bounce rate will be lowered as well.
Test it out!
If you’re not already bidding on your brand terms, then start now, and check your traffic and ranking continuously. I’d love to hear your results!
