Are You Burning Cash Paying Google For Your Own Brand Keywords?
At least a few times a year there’s a heated debate that starts a little like this:
“We’re ranked #1 for our brand, why would we spend money on Google for it if we’re already there?”
Sure, that makes sense on the surface. Right?
Unfortunately, it’s not so simple – there’s a little more to it once we look at the real data behind it. Here are the 5 critical questions to ask if you’re considering bidding for your brand on Google AdWords:
1. Will it result in extra business?
This is the key question to ask but it can be a little difficult to get to the real data.
Brand campaigns almost always produce a huge ROI when you’re looking at the campaigns, but the truth is it does take away from the organic non-paid visitors.
Nevertheless, from tests with our clients, we found there’s generally a 10%+ increase in net brand related traffic when we look at the search console and AdWords data.
It doesn’t sound like much, but these are your highest value visitors and we want to give them the best experience of your brand. Even with no competitors bidding on your brand, the net increase can be attributed to the fact that there is more opportunity for clicks having more real estate directing to your website and the extra AdWords features not offered in organic search.
2. Am I losing anything not bidding on my brand?
Most businesses don’t really know how much they’re losing by not bidding on their brand. People searching for your brand are:
- Coming to you from expensive offline advertising such as TV, radio and print
- Highly qualified word of mouth referrals
- Past customers looking to buy from you again
- Customers still researching you
These are potential customers that want to deal with you but can be swayed by competitors.
Also, it can be difficult to monitor all of your branded search terms to see if competitors are bidding on them – the best option is to have a presence for your own branded search terms, which drives up the cost for competitors to compete with you, making it less likely that they’ll try.
3. If bidding on brand is so profitable, should I bid on competitor brands?
It depends. Sometimes you can make this profitable and Google will even suggest these to you. We find the best opportunity for these campaigns are when a larger direct competitor with a strong brand is under-serving their customers. We’ve found that syphoning off customers works really well in this situation and can even be some of the highest returning campaigns.
It’s definitely something worth testing if you’re going after a bigger competitor.
4. How do I stop competitors bidding on my brand?
In 2013 Google made a massive change to how they handle trademarks and no longer restrict any AdWords advertisers from bidding against trademark keywords. Their official trademark policy states: “We don’t investigate or restrict trademarks as keywords.”
So you can’t officially stop people bidding on your brand, but we’ve found asking them politely can sometimes persuade competitors to take down ads on our client ads in exchange for not bidding on theirs. Especially if you’re the bigger company this is well worth the effort in reaching out.
5. How do you stop competitors using our brand in their ads?
Unfortunately, this actually happens quite often and is definitely not allowed. The bad news is Google is not proactive in this area and the official takedown method escalating to Google can be time-consuming.
The problem is usually with using keyword insertion, when your brand keyword triggers a competitor’s ad and most times they don’t even know that this is what is happening.
The best way is again to go directly to the competitor and screenshot their ad showing your brand. Treating it as an accidental mistake in their campaign and using terms like “deceptive” seem to get these issues resolved quite quickly.
When handled correctly you’ll rarely need to escalate through Google but here is how you can escalate further.
You’re probably burning cash NOT paying Google for your brand keywords
People searching for your brand already want to deal with you, and ever since the 2013 Google AdWords update your competitors are allowed to show up for your brand keywords. Bidding for your brand on Google not only has shown to increase traffic to your website, it can be a great defence against competitors looking to steal your customers.
