Whatever your title in search engine marketing is, you likely have an opinion on brand term bidding for pay-per-click (PPC) keywords. There has been much discussion—and much written—on this topic recently. (Actually, there are 386,000 Google results for "should I bid on brand keywords in AdWords" at the time of this writing.)
For those unfamiliar with PPC, the reason for the discussion and *gasp* debate is fairly simple:
- Those without an investment in paid search tend to hesitate spending money on traffic that could have come for "free".
- Those with an investment in paid search tend to prefer the inclusion of high-converting brand terms with high quality scores in their PPC accounts (and PPC reports).
There is a time to bid on brand keywords
No, I’m not a whistle-blower on paid search. I'm not here to reveal a conspiracy that all search engine marketers (SEMs) have signed in blood to deceive the masses about the benefits of brand bidding for the sake of the industry.
(Source of images)
In fact, I generally believe the pro-brand bidding arguments raised by my fellow PPCers are compelling and insightful. If you are unfamiliar with these main arguments, check out these articles:
- Brand Terms in Bing Ads: To Bid or Not to Bid? by Bing Ads
- 5 Reasons to Start Bidding on Branded Terms (If You Aren’t Already) by Kayla Kurtz of PPC Hero
- Five Reasons to Bid on Branded Terms in PPC by Erin Sagan of Wordstream
- Incremental Clicks Aspect of Search Advertising (PDF) by Google
Now, if you read those articles and still believe you should always avoid bidding on brand terms, I have one question for you:
If you don’t specifically bid on brand keywords, do you then purposefully exclude all forms of brand keywords from all of your PPC campaigns?
If your answer is no, then I’m confused. If you don’t exclude all of your brand keywords from all your campaigns, then your ads will show for brand terms whether you want them to or not.
Let’s say you (Polly) sells purple packs of pickled pumpernickel. You purposefully avoid bidding on any brand keywords, but you are bidding on modified broad match +pickled +pumpernickel, and maybe even phrase match "pickled pumpernickel". (If PPC match types are new to you, read this Google Help article: Using Keyword Matching Options.)
Here's the problem. If someone types in "polly's packs of pickled pumpernickel", which includes your brand name (on which you are NOT bidding), then your ads will still appear… on a branded keyword.
Oops.
If your answer is yes, however, I will first applaud you. Congratulations, you have followed your argument to its logical conclusion.
But after I heartily slap you on your back, I will caution you to rethink your strategy. You decide that you “ain’t stupid 'nough to waste hard-earned cash” on brand terms, so you add them all as negatives into all of your campaigns.
Unfortunately, there are three glaring weaknesses with this strategy:
- If you added them in as [exact] match negatives alone, any brand term that a customer queries into the Googs will now be shuffled into your non-brand ad groups, and you will pay a far higher cost-per-click (CPC) for that non-branded query than you would have had you just bid on brand in the first place.
- If you added them in as broad or phrase match negatives, you will actually be excluding your brand from any brand auction, and you wouldn’t even know you missed it since it won't appear in your search query report. All those competitors bidding on "pickled pumpernickel" will have a heyday with those top three SERP slots on your branded query.
Oops.
Weakness No. 2 above actually gets worse with e-commerce sites, thanks to the growing power of Google Shopping in the SERPs. If you completely pull your brand from your account, then you are allowing far more advertisers to show in a highly clickable format above your organic results. In the example below, had Home Depot excluded its brand from Google Shopping, there would have been five highly visual competitors' ads appearing above their first organic result.
(Side note: Regarding Google Shopping brand traffic, Martin Roettgerding details a brilliant strategy by which you can separate brand queries from non-brand queries in Google Shopping campaigns. It's worth a read if you manage e-commerce PPC: Taking Google Shopping to the Next Level.)
There is a time to NOT bid on brand keywords (NBBK)
Charts, graphs, and arguments are great. In fact, as I noted above, there are many convincing charts, graphs, and arguments for why a PPCer should bid on brand terms.
But unsurprisingly, I’ve found SMB owners and general managers to be less-than-impressed with averages, should-be's and theories when it comes to paying for terms they could have gotten for free.
After all, when it comes right down to it, we are providing a service for real people with real businesses who feel the pain of every dollar in their marketing budget. This kind of emotional proximity can make things a little more difficult than simply showing a graph about incremental value.
Maybe I’m the only one who has ever received pushback from an SMB client when I pitch brand bidding, but I feel that I’ve only ever seen PPC articles that talk about brand bidding solely in a positive light. So my question for us PPCers now is this: Is it ALWAYS best to bid on brand keywords?
For instance, look at this example of a local brand here in Billings. (Shockingly, we do have coffee shops in Montana). Would you bid on this [brand] term?
After multiple conversations with concerned SMB clients, I have come to the opinion that it is not always best to bid on all brand keywords.
To elaborate, I do not make a practice of bidding on brand keywords that match all of the following criteria:
- The [brand keyword] is exact match - If a keyword is a modified broad match or phrase, there is always a chance that someone will type in your brand with some random long-tail phrase you never considered but that a competitor is bidding on. In that case, you want to appear in that SERP so they don't win the day. Because of this regularly occurring scenario, I consider not bidding on exact match terms.
- The [brand keyword] has no competition – On one hand, even if your brand dominates organic, those three top competitor ads are tough to argue with, especially with mobile. Have you seen your mobile results lately for your brand? You might be horrified to see how much of that first tiny little page is taken up by “their” ads. On the other hand, if there is no ad competition then the competition argument for bidding on that term loses ground fast. Don't forget that in Adwords, a competitor could be excluding your location, have a capped budget during the time you are searching or be ineligible to show for your query for some other reason at the time and place you are searching. Because of this, it can be helpful (if you have the budget) to use third-party software that monitors competition bidding on your brand terms.
- The [brand keyword] first page of organic results is dominated by the client’s brand – Admittedly, a client's brand is likely going to be strong enough to dominate organic real estate on the first page of the SERPs, but some local businesses don’t control it all. This situation requires you to make a judgment call.
Please note that I said ALL of these criteria must be met. I bid on brand terms unless all three of these criteria are met.
My NBBK strategy
It would be remiss of me to leave you without giving you direction on how to implement my NBBK strategy in your SMB PPC accounts. Here is how I (generally) set up brand campaigns for my SMB clients:
Note 1 - The (E) stands for exact match, (BM) stands for modified broad match, and (P) stands for phrase match.
Note 2 – While some have completely eliminated phrase match from their strategy, I still use phrase in its own ad group for brands with two words in their core brand name. This is especially important if the two-word brand name can mean something completely different if those words are not used together.
Note 3 – Add all exact match terms in as mirrored negatives into the other non-exact ad groups. This is an essential part of the strategy, since it will prevent negatives that you do not want to bid on from being shown with other match types.
Note 4 – Pause all ad groups or keywords that meet the three previous NBBK requirements. In this example, I paused the brand (E) and buy brand (E) ad groups. Now, if someone types in your brand exactly, your ads will not appear; but if they type in your brand any other way, your ads will appear for all the other match types.
Final thoughts
With my strategy for (not) bidding on all brand keywords, you really can have your cake and eat it, too. This will allow you to engender trust from your client, while allowing to bid on those treasured brand keywords so that you can smile happily at your higher quality scores and increased conversions.
What about big brands?
I think it’s helpful to point out here that there is admittedly a big difference between an SMB brand and a national brand. Many larger brands have multiple competitors bidding on their [brand] keywords, so this strategy is moot in those instances. However, I still think brand bidding is a good idea in those instances to avoid losing your loyal customers to a competitor’s ad.
Where do I start?
You might realistically inquire, "What am I supposed to do, start guessing at which brand terms I shouldn't be bidding on? This seems like a lot of work." On the contrary, I've found identifying [brand] terms for filtering to be a fairly simple practice that adds minimal extra time to creating my brand campaigns.
Now, here is how I suggest you go about finding what not to target:
- Manually research the [brand] core terms. These will be the most likely terms for you to filter out.
- Identify the top traffic brand terms in the client's Google Analytics > Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries report, and manually research those to consider excluding as [brand] if they meet all three criteria detailed above.
- Don't stress out about it. If you do your due diligence on those first two steps, then you will probably pick up the majority of terms you need to filter. When you run across them in the future, while mining your brand campaign search query report, you can always add more.
Why should you do this?
Why go through the hassle? Why not just bid on these, collect the bump to the account's quality score, and move on with life?
Because you are advertising for a real SMB company, run by real people who care about real money. This point cannot be undervalued.
- If you are an agency, your client will be shocked that you are willing to lose conversions from the PPC pile (even though that's hardly a reality anymore now that we better understand attribution, right?) for the betterment of the company as a whole.
- If you are in-house, your boss will be delighted that you are thinking of creative ways to maximize budget and conversions, therefore demonstrating that you also care about the company into which he has poured his life.
This speaks volumes to SMB managers and owners. They have tight budgets and tighter fists. So if you present a strategy to help their brand be found without mindlessly bidding on every brand term that comes along, they will love you for it.
What about you? What would you add to this strategy? Do you have any concerns about it? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Frederik's post in his above comment makes a great case for paid brand, so let's think about the reasons NOT to bid on brand for balance. (As a side note, I'm actually not concerned about the regular visitors side of things as I can use RLSA to exclude previous site visitors / members.)
For starters, marketing can really be divided into two camps:
Paid search almost exclusively falls into the first camp, and paid brand is the purest form of demand collection: Someone is literally telling Google that they want to go to your company's website. The simplest way to answer the question of paid brand is - would they have come to you no matter what at this point? Is paying for the extra SERP real estate incremental or not?
Big brands vs. Little brands
My guess (informed opinion?) is that for brands with brand recognition / loyalty that paid brand is pointless. Let's think back to that controversial ebay study which essentially said there was zero impact on revenue from paid brand. It makes sense though - no one is searching for "ebay" and going anywhere else. I'd wager their organic CTRs were 90%+. It's also important to note that paid brand for a company like ebay is expensive - it might be cheap in CPC terms but it's almost certainly millions of (non-incremental) dollars a month. Millions which could be spent much more effectively on demand creation (through TV, display etc.).
So really, there is a huge distinction between Joe the plumber bidding on brand and ebay, Nike, Amazon etc. The former will likely suffer from competitors bidding on his terms, the latter almost certainly won't.
How should we solve the paid brand question?
The simplest recommendation would be for everyone to run a brand on/off experiment. Make sure the dollars spent on paid brand are reinvested into other channels and see what happens. If you can find a consistent (read:non-seasonality affected) time period to do week on / week off testing you should start with that. Count total sign ups / revenue / leads in both periods and see if paid brand actually makes as big of a difference as you think.
It's cheap though!
So I kind of answered this above for ebay but even for Joe the plumber it might be actually be expensive. If you're in a fixed budget environment, and you might be for any number of reasons - cash flow, sales staff limitations - then paid brand might be less incremental than non-brand. Let's say Joe is well known locally and half of his search budget is just collecting "Joe the plumber" searches. He's losing a lot of opportunity cost to capture non-branded demand that his competitors get to own instead.
Get to the bloody point...
Sometimes paid brand works. Sometimes it is a waste of money.
We need to fight against either of the above becoming accepted fact. I've seen conclusive data on both sides - it really depends on the company. Let's change our thinking to be "I should test that" rather than "Of course paid brand is good". Let's learn to set client expectations about sign-ups and conversions if we take brand out - let's stop resting on brand as a crutch to help our overall account numbers.
Thanks Sam, well thought out and articulated! I agree 100% with your "It Depends" conclusion and think you brought up some great discussion points (and even greater paragraph headings). It's especially interesting to hear your thoughts knowing you've seen both agency & in-house side of things. I started PPC in-house at an e-commerce SMB and think it has given me an appreciation for certain behind-the-curtains aspects I might not have had otherwise had I entered directly into agency life.
A Heading for Sam's Sake.
To tag on to your comment, another oddity that pops up with enterprise/mega-brand e-commerce PPC that is usually not seen in SMB PPC, is your own retailers bidding on your brand. If you are Nike (or another manufacturer/provider), do you really want to be bidding against all the retailers selling your Nike product? This not only makes you spend money on these brand terms, but also runs the risk of annoying your retailers. (Nike might not be the best example here, but hopefully you get my point).
Finally, we haven't even hit on the trademark issue either with enterprise PPC and brand bidding. Tim Wagner brought to my attention on Twitter how more and more big brands are suing Google and settling so competitors can't bid on their brand terms (do a search for American Airlines and notice the lack of ads).
But What About...
One area I'm still wondering about though, even for mega-known brands is a combination of brand and general terms. Wish I had a better example than this, but let's say someone typed in [nike running shoes]. If Nike had chosen to pull all brand ads, than Adidas, Asics, other brands advertising on "running shoes" would all show up there (the reason why this isn't a great example, is because only ads that actually show for me on this query are retailer ads :) But I think the logic behind it stands. That was the main aim of my post, to help brands think about not totally ditching OR totally bidding on all brand ads.
A major benefit you provided is in reminding us that things vary so often in PPC, that much testing and individual thinking is needed for every account.
First, love the headlines.
There is a distinction between pure brand and brand plus (your Nike running shoes example). The further away from your brand you get, the higher the incrementality of search spend. Who's going to Under Armour after typing in [nike]? That user wants Nike. However with "nike running shoes" the user wants two things - Nike and Running Shoes. It could be that the desire for the latter is higher than the former - in which case other offers for running shoes from other brands might sway users.
Great post + discussion. Definitely worthy of a bigger industry conversation.
Too bad we had this conversation the week of Hero Conference, perhaps it would have made for a good panel!
That is an interesting point - I would argue that someone simply typing in your brand is almost certainly looking for YOU and the opportunity to be swayed by another ad is low. However, if they are shopping around then it would be beneficial to cement your brand and increase the potential for click throughs. It really is 'horses for courses' in that every scenario is different although I did like the 3 criteria which a campaign must fulfil in order to definitely not bid on brand keywords. Thanks Kirk
Hey Simon, good thoughts. I will push back somewhat on this statement: "someone simply typing in your brand is almost certainly looking for YOU and the opportunity to be swayed by another ad is low."
I think what you say is logical, and I would tend to agree with you in principle, however as someone who advertises on competitor brands for clients, I can say with confidence that a good amount of traffic can be dissuaded on brand terms.
On the other hand, you did say "low" and that's probably accurate, however losing any brand (focused, high intent, probably loyal) traffic to my client's competitors pains me a LOT. Even if it's a "low" amount, on a bigger brand, that "low" amount could be hundreds of clicks. My goal is to get 0% traffic to my client competition on brand terms, however I want to do so at the best value with no spend waste. Thus my strategy above.
I agree that ever scenario is different! That's why a good manager (agency or in-house) is a must. Thanks for your comment!
Hi Kirk, I like bidding on branded keywords when I can afford them. Using variations of "Nike" or "Home Depot" can get expensive unless they are long-tailed. The other problem for many affiliate marketers is that they are expressly prohibited from bidding on advertiser keywords in the acceptance of their terms. Thanks!
Good point, I was thinking of the brands themselves when writing the post, and you are correct that affiliates should stay away from brand terms! I as a brand would be seriously PO'd to discover an affiliate on my brand keywords.
Great post Kirk. I actually wrote an article on this topic last week. Other instances where you need to reconsider bidding on the branded keywords are if the site has a lot of regular users (like a bank with online banking) or if it shares name with a significantly more well-known person and/or company. The article I wrote can be found here if you are interested :)
Thanks Frederik, I will enjoy reading your post! I have a lot of respect for 3Q.
Those are two other good examples of when to be cautious about bidding on brand. When I first wrote this and submitted it for review mid-March, I hadn't really run across anyone else writing about when not to bid on brand (though easily could have missed posts if they're out there) so I'm encouraged others are thinking along these lines too! Thanks for your comment.
I'm happy to see you listed a scenario where you do not automatically bid on branded keywords (exact match) as I often fit those 3 criteria - and few folks talk about that scenario (possibly because it is rare).
In your response to Sam Owen. you said "if you are Nike (or another manufacturer/provider), do you really want to be bidding against all the retailers selling your Nike product?"
I am manufacturer and branded search bids against my re-sellers. Because every sale is my sale no matter who sells it, the issue becomes a mater of profit margin as opposed to market share. If I achieve a 70% margin through my web store, and a 50% margin as a wholesaler to competing advertisers, my branded ad conversions only reap a 20% bump in margin (while making my product less appealing to re-sellers as their sales volume shrinks). So I have to weigh my ad spend against a relatively small profit margin as opposed to weighing it against a 70% margin. Ultimately, even if my branded PPC is profitable, it is better for me to move branded PPC dollars to channels with a higher return, or re-purpose those branded dollars to unbranded ads to gain new customers that are not aware of my brand.
I like my re-sellers liking me - as some of them are big-box retailers that advertise for me in other ways, display my products on end-caps, run promotions, etc. If their sales aren't good, they'll focus on a better performing product and I could potentially lose a lot more than the 20% margin bump.
So from my position, the answer is "no - you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you unless you are prepared to feed yourself."
Thanks for this great article!
Lets-Go-Testing, Thanks for taking the time to share your experiences, fascinating hearing it from your POV! The margin considerations make perfect sense and I've often wondered about those as I have been on the retailer side of bidding against manufacturers. Obviously, every manu/product margin/situation will be different, but I wonder how many brand bidding decisions made by manus are as detailed as yours, and how many are simply "bid on everything because that's what our agency (or an article we read) wants us to do".
Enjoyed your comment a lot, best to you in the New Year!
This strategy is very useful for what I would term "most" clients. Although we're always trying to achieve the absolute highest ROI for clients, sometimes that becomes a secondary priority to volume. There's a fine line between getting all the clicks and getting all the optimised clicks.
If you're following the above strategy but not getting enough volume, you need to open the floodgates and bid on those other brand terms (low comp, etc.) because you'll get those extra clicks, especially for an enterprise level brand. If the brand is well known and much-Googled, there may not be any value in not bidding on some brand terms. The overall value of capturing "every click" would be higher.
You did address the SMB portion of this
So I guess I agree. 99% of the time, maybe. And that's probably true for most things in SEO as well - there isn't an "always, everytime" answer for most ranking factors.
Great first post & give us more.
Thanks for the comment Matt. Yes, I do distinguish between Enterprise level accounts and SMBs here as you noted, and I think you bring up some great points on volume and the role it plays here as well.
I enjoyed watching you wrestle with the outworking of my strategy throughout your comment. I participate in a weekly chat on Twitter (#PPCChat) and the running reality-joke answer for everything is "It depends" (sounds like that could be a similar answer in SEO from what you said!). You figure out a plan, a strategy (even dabbling in *gasp* "best practices") for creating/overhauling an account. Then you adjust and adapt to the unique nature of your client, your client's industry, location, personality, etc. That's part of what makes being a digital marketer more than science, but art as well!
The science of digital marketing is pretty awesome and incredibly powerful but to be honest, I like the art a little more, myself.
Hey Kirk,
Cool post and a very nice framework for making the decision. We usually do bid on our client's brands, but I'll reevaluate this based on your three rules... I'm curious how those will apply for our clients. And the mobile results... good idea, will check that out, too.
There's one argumet to be made for still doing brand bidding: getting the auction insights report on those terms to find competitors bidding on your brand. You can do this using third party software and there are some great tools out there, but bidding on a term and checking the report might be cheaper. As a compromise you could turn this on and off from time to time, so that you can still get the report but don't spend too much money.
Thanks for the shoutout, by the way :)
Martin
Martin, interesting auction insights idea. I had not considered that, but it seems to make a lot of sense for SMBs without the budget for the 3rd Party Software (especially since those Brand terms are usually so cheap). Thanks for the idea!
If you don't bid on your own brand keywords then your competitor may do.
what's your point? It still comes down to cost, organic performance and context. If I'm searching for Disneyland and a Six Flag result appears I don't care... I want to go to Disneyland
This topic is driving me crazy. I have clients who dominate their name searches, yet a PPC "partner" keeps buying their name, placing an ad right above their organics (no competitors doing it).
Sorry to hear :/ Can you reach out to them and ask them to exclude the exact match client core brand terms? That would take care of that problem. I do that for nearly all of my clients (unless heavy competition) and it is not difficult.
Great article and helps to have someone else with a similar view to me.
At present we....
1. Don't bid on navigation brand terms or customer service (as it isn't a focus) e.g. [brand] [brand website]
2. Attempt where possible to underbid retailers or don't bid at all if our products dominate the SERPs (whether they click to us your not).
3. Don't bid where our SEO reports show a very strong presence.
The idea is that this would free up budget to chase non-branded terms and feed the funnel at a higher level. However the conversation that keeps coming back (with results being unknown is)...
Would the lower CPC and higher CTR in brand campaigns bring us an increased Account-level performance that would bring down the average CPC of ALL categories. (Theory says yes, but whether the saving outweighs the cost cannot be calculated).
Does anyone have insight to share?
As your brand/product keywords would receive high QS due to relevancy, thus cheaper clicks, I would always give them a test campaign to see if searchers click on such ads. Remember that you are not competing against retailers only but also your product/service "manufacturers" i.e. your direct competition.
The value of traffic lost
might surpass the campaign cost.
It even rhymes!!!
As above, and inline with eBay findings, anyone searching for our products is very unlikely to purchase from a competitor so we have no concern of that. The only value under consideration is a significant increase to the average Account-Level QS (or not) which would bring us hidden value of some magnitude.
I am hoping someone has specific/tested/proven insight as opposed to the theory that we already have, but thanks for your response regardless.
Couple of thoughts. There is no account level Quality Score (super controversial statement, I know, but keep reading), so it's important to realize individual keywords act in a vacuum.
Basically, I think there is an account level Quality Score in terms of overall performance tracking (keeping an eye on things), but I don't believe there is an account level Quality Score in terms of actually affecting account elements.
Point 1 - Adding brand keywords will not lower CPCs for other keywords or raise the QS of other keywords.
That being said, I think it is helpful to monitor how your overall account is doing for Quality Score (more than one script out there for this). I think this can be helpful to keep an eye on an account in general.
However, that is different than what you are asking: can adding high QS keywords affect other keywords in a positive way. Google has explicitly said this is not true: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/settling-...
Also, frankly, it just makes sense to me. A keyword quality score is based upon how that specific keyword interacts with things like CTR, ad relevance, and LP relevance. Unless Google is completely lying to us (not entirely impossible, of course), there is no indication that QS is affected by any external sources other than those 100% related to that specific keyword.
On the other side, Wordstream believes it does exist and lowers overall CTR of new terms and they have some smart people (who I count as friends) so there's that... https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/29/accou...
Point 2 - Adding brand keywords can help increase overall sales at a reduced CPA. So as long as those are incremental sales to a brand's organic sales and makes sense with all the other factors discussed in my article, then sure, do it.
What adding brand terms can do to benefit an account overall, is to increase sales overall at a low cost. I have a client who asks about brand once in awhile, but he is spending pennies for sales, so we always decide that if spending another $100 for a month guarantees him many thousands of dollars in sales... why not? Especially with reports like Bing put out regarding incremental sales.
No perfect answer and I do believe that nearly every situation is different (I never have the same brand strategy from one client to the next), but I hope that helps.
Thanks Kirk. I coincidentally had a friend show me Google's categorical denial of an Ad Group, Category or Account Level QS today, so I am now content. I really appreciate your thoughts.
Love the article and it is still relevant now.
I have a basic question about how Google is ranking paid search terms. I am novice at SEO/PPC but love the world. I am exploring search terms with low costs and competition.
One I am confused about is the search term for a great search engine out there indeed. When I see ads for indeed they are only on the second page of results. I understand some terms are branded and cannot be used in Google ads like "indeed". My question is why are there no search results for paid ads on the first page? I noticed in the Keyword Planning tool on GA that the cost is low and the competition is pretty low. Is there a technical reason that ads won't show up higher (like page 1 top)?
Did you know why eBay stopped bidding on their brand name in 2013? If yes, then that may not be applicable to your brand! It’s crucial to interrogate what’s in your brand’s best interest. It’s also important to remember that, whilst AdWords can instantly gratify those looking for a higher click through rate or increased traffic, these are mostly short-term triumphs. Find it out yourself at Digital Potion.
Did you know why eBay stopped bidding on their brand name in 2013? If yes, then that may not be applicable to your brand! It’s crucial to interrogate what’s in your brand’s best interest. It’s also important to remember that, whilst Google AdWords can instantly gratify those looking for a higher click through rate or increased traffic, these are mostly short-term triumphs.
Really interesting article on selecting right keywords for your PPC campaigns.
Big fan of bidding on brand keywords. Also a big fan of biding on competitor's brand keywords as well. The latter is often over looked by many companies I've looked at over the years.
Awesome post Kirk!
I was just wondering about the structure of the brand adgroups you have. What's the point in having all those brand ad groups though for a service company that doesn't have sales or for a keyword like "buy brand name"? When we create brand campaigns they're all together in the same ad group.
Totally agree with your advice in this post and the chances that a brand campaign are not needed are very slim - your 3 guidelines were perfect.
Thanks for the kind words!
Short answer to your question: do what works best for the specific account in question.
Traffic volume always plays a huge role in my segmentation decisions and is no different here. If I have a client with 5000 brand clicks a day, it makes sense to me to spend time to segment things out to include modifiers as well. That way, just like with other keywords, we can nail down ad copy and landing page (you probably want to send [brand coupon] searches to a different page with different ad copy than [brand reviews] queries).
On the other hand, if it's a super small client, I just do 2 or 3 ad groups of the core brand terms separated by match type (yes, I think there's value in doing that... my argument here: Here's Why You Should Separate Ad Groups By Match Types). In this model, the Broad Modified and/or Phrase will pick up all your modifiers and with such low traffic is likely the better option. Of course, always use the SQR in an ongoing manner to pull out brand modifier queries that seem to stand out from the rest.
Tino, yes each case is one to consider and brand bidding won't look the same for every business, hopefully I've given a good template to at least begin considering what to bid on and what not to bid on for Brand PPC. Thanks for your comment!
Hi Kirk!
Actually, I think a ppc ad is not significantly influences when creating traffic compared to a normal classified.
Many people only click on an ad for ppc when you are interested in buying the item.
Still, I agree, that if no bids you by your brand, you do another. And this will make your competitors appear in the search results when your customers are looking for you.
Paying for our brand, we will not stop our competitors can bid for it, but if we're going to put things more complicated for your ad does not come over us.
We must consider whether we will actually be feasible for our business and we have to rethink our strategy.
Good job!
"there are three glaring weaknesses with this strategy:
1. If you added them as exact
2. If you added them as broad..."
Where's weakness #3?
Hey justRoss, good catch :) I also noticed this error after I had already submitted it and the post was uneditable. After my first draft, I decided one of the "weaknesses" was not as glaring as I first thought so I eliminated it.
Totally agree, I've never understood why people bid on his own brand, even if they are appearing by organic. Especially, I wanted to comment something more: Competitors. I can't understand how Google now allows a company bid on the brand keyword of his main competitor, in my opinion this is a dirty technique...
Thanks for your comment. I think there is a 2-fold response. First, I'm not entirely opposed to competitor bidding, though it is often non-profitable since Quality Scores are so high. Trademark bidding is a different animal and controversial. It is still legal in the states (as long as the TM does not appear in the ads), but more companies are suing Google and winning settlements (do a search for American Airlines and notice the lack of ads, a formal AA marketing employee told me about this).
On the other hand, brand bidding as I mention on phrase and broad modified still has high merit in my opinion because it gives you an edge when competitors are bidding on the other keywords in the query someone typed in with your brand. Let's say Blues Berries. Competition is bidding on +berries and are eligible to appear, but when you bid on your brand +blues, you will get a high quality score and much lower CPC thus dominating your competition, even though they aren't directly bidding on your brand for what became a brand query. Because of that, I think it is still profitable to bid on some brand.
In certain industries, it can be seen as "dirtier" than others as you pointed out so the PPC mantra "it depends" should be applied here as well!
I'm also divided on the brand keyword campaign. It also depends on how long the brand has been in the space. For a new brand that is just launching with a tight budget, the brand keyword is obviously appropriate at least until the organic ranking has been reached.
That definitely plays a roll as well. There are more than just the factors I listed that a brand has to consider.
On the other hand, I would say that even for bigger brands, it may be necessary to bid on brand keywords for the reasons I mentioned above. One of the biggest things to consider is competition. This is especially crucial in mobile devices. Let's say someone types your brand and product into Google and you have just 2 competitors bidding on that product (even if not on your brand). They will show up and push your top organic slot nearly off that tiny screen.
Finally, because of the studies done to demonstrate incremental benefit to having both paid and organic results on brand terms, I think one is hard pressed to demonstrate how it is always a negative thing.
That being said, "it depends" is the Golden Rule for the Digital Marketer so if there are other reasons not to bid on brand for a certain company that that's the way it is!
i am a SEO expert and i learn about PPC.
So, thanks for your wonderful information about Adword PPC
Great, glad it was helpful!
I'm new to the MOZ community, so please forgive the belated post, but I find this topic very interesting. Recently I was at a meetup where Lars Hirsch, head of the Advertisers Analytics & Insights team for Microsoft Bing Ads, presented some pretty compelling data for where it makes sense to bid on Brand. You can find some of that data in a slideshare presentation by searching his name. Of course, this is a Bing Ads employee making a case for something which is inherently good for said employee, but the data looked pretty solid, and echoed my experience on the matter.
I think you're right concerning SMBs, but for larger companies, companies with poor branding choices (too generic) and others it is very easy to get your lunch eaten by competitors who swoop in and steal clicks which otherwise would have gone to you. I think the myth that most people buy into is that if someone is searching for your brand, they're not going to stop until they find you. That simply isn't the case. Not always. It depends on the vertical of course, but often searchers are looking for category dominance more than anything else, and with the tools available to paid search marketers these days (various extensions, RAIS, etc), it's easy to represent that sort of authority on the SERP. It is frequently worth it to steal clicks from their competitors - especially if they don't have to pay too heavy a price in their Quality Score disadvantage. I have one client whose brand is so generic to the industry that competitors pay almost no penalty when competing on brand terms. Of course, this cuts both ways and we've been fighting back with good results.
On a side note, I've noticed that Bing is incredibly liberal about the keywords it will show branded ads on. The keywords are actually quite apt, but since many of us often bid brand high (because of the QS discount), if you don't fence off brand with proper negative keywords, you will pay through the nose as you bid to position 1 more general terms that can get very expensive very fast.
I would love to see more discussion on this topic - but even more data. Ultimately we need to be able to plug this into an equation to determine whether it is worth it to bid on brand for each customer.
Thanks for the great post!
James
Thanks James, good call on really ensuring negative KWs are part of the brand bidding strategy! Also, I've seen Traffic Sculpting/Mirrored Negatives working really well as well. I.e., let's say you pull all - Brand "reviews" - queries into one ad group and then show "review" targeted ads that land on a review-centered landing page. This can be a great way of even further taking advantage of brand bidding as a way to funnel traffic well.