If you need help with GTM, why not get in touch with me?
I often get clients asking me if they should be bidding on their own brand. They’ve heard about it but since they rank for their own brand anyway, they don’t quite see the point. My advice to them is always yes. Here are 8 reasons why.
Why should you waste money bidding on your own brand when you could be getting this traffic for free?
First, this is not wasting money as the next few sections will explain.
Secondly, the cost per click for your own brand is very low.
Thirdly, if despite the low cpc, your overall cost is high, then you’ll be getting a ton of clicks. Congrats, your brand is well-known, you’re huge and you can afford this cost.
Metrics for your own brand campaign are usually crazy. I already mentioned a low cpc; in addition CTR in excess of 50% is not unheard of, even ROIs exceeding 50.
The huge CTR in particular is going to have an overall benefit on the account and help drive down the overall cpc. By how much? That I cannot say, only that the effect of a brand campaign is positive.
What’s better? One box of chocolate or two? One result for your brand search or two?
If you could dominate the results for your own brand search, wouldn’t you prefer that as opposed to having a single organic result? Well, a PPC ad gets you one additional result and helps you get there.
By taking up more space, you also become more visible. Half a page of brand results has more of an impact than a single search result.
If a search for your own brand yields your Facebook page, Yell page, Wikipedia page, website and Google profile among other results and in no particular order, wouldn’t you prefer the user to select a property that you control?
Certainly your website should be the first destination and if there are two ways to get to it, via a PPC ad and an organic result, then there is a higher likelihood that a user clicks on either of them instead of elsewhere.
By poor results I mean anything which you don’t want a potential customer to see in the search results. So it could be a property you don’t own, like your Yell page or even your FB page or it could be a competitor, a similar sounding name in a completely different area, or even a bad review.
Put your best foot forward, show your best result right at the top.
Unlike an organic result, you control exactly what you write in your brand ad and ad extensions. Set any promotion you wish and any call-to-action to encourage the user to take a specific action.
To me, this is one of the key advantages of brand bidding.
I think everyone will agree that in this case, own brand bidding is not optional. But you have bigger problems if you’re an established brand and your website is not ranking on the first page…
Imagine a search results page with your own PPC ad showing at the top. You’ve carefully crafted a sales message. Next result is your website followed by more related properties. Bad results are nowhere to be seen. The top half of the search results page leads to your website.
Now compare another search results page for your brand with just your website ranking at the top and not taking up much space. All other results lead to properties not related to your brand, say the name of a movie, a book, an actress, a place, a news article, etc.
Both pages contain the result that the user is looking for, your website; but which page is more convincing to be clicked upon? The overall impact of the first page is such that a user is not only more likely to click on something but that something is more likely to be your website.
One of the rare times when this will waste budget is when a significant proportion of the traffic is searching for customer support, aftersales, complaints or any query unlikely to result in additional business.
You don’t want to be paying for people to come to your website to make a complaint!
Are you convinced about bidding on your own brand or still sitting on the fence?
If you need help setting up your ad campaigns professionally, just get in touch with me.