Even though branded keywords are an important part of overall PPC strategy, advertisers are often unsure or else completely against buying them. The age old question put forth is “Why buy my own trademarked terms if I’m already showing up in the number one position in free, organic listings?”
While the argument may seem logical, there are some very sound reasons for buying your brand’s keywords:
1) Own and protect your brand: Search engines allow competitors and/or affiliates to bid on virtually any trademarked term. Some advertisers consider it “unethical”, but the reality is that it’s common practice. So, why not own it yourself, rather than letting your competitors and affiliates own that ad real estate in order to either a) push their own product/service as an alternative or worse, b) use false or misleading ads to confuse your potential customers.
Controlling your brand image and marketing message are important and PPC ads are perfect for this because you can change and test messaging on the fly, and even use “”Official Site” in ads so as to make clear your ad will lead that user to the actual site they were searching.
2) Improve your quality scores: Bidding on your branded keywords may also help improve Quality Scores, as suggested by Dave Davis here – “…always bid (and bid high) on your company or brand name. You will get a massive boost in historical CTR because 70%+ of the time, your ad is what searchers are looking for. You will pay pennies per click and decrease the normalized Quality Score and historical account CTR of any competitors bidding on your brand or company name!”
3) Overall revenue may be higher: Countless studies show increased clicks and conversions when companies owned both top PPC and organic listings for their brand:
From Enquiro Research in partnership with Ipsos Mori:
“When a brand name is the top result in both natural and paid search results, 83% of consumers looking to buy would consider a purchase. Without paid search, however, the same brand name as the top result in organic search only obtains 73% purchase consideration”
From Omniture study:
“Our client was thrilled to learn that conversions across all search engines were higher by 22.98 percent when the brand name keyword ads were present. Better yet, revenue per visitor was higher by nearly 21.94 percent when the ads were present.”
From NYU Stern study:
“Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.”
Of course, as with everything else PPC, you have to decide what’s best for YOUR brand, as every industry, company, product and/or offer is different. The only way you know how buying branded PPC affects your bottom line is to test it yourself. Pause your branded PPC campaign and/or ad group for set time frame, then closely monitor organic traffic and conversions to see if you experience considerable dip in traffic or loss in revenue.
NOTE: You as an advertiser can file a Google AdWords trademark complaint letter specifically advising Google that you do not want other advertisers using your trademark in their ad. However, this does NOT mean advertisers must stop buying your trademark. You would probably need your lawyer to send a cease and desist directly to the company because the search engines clearly state they do not police this on their advertiser’s behalf.
Read the Google AdWords trademark policy, and here’s the link to file trademark complaint letter.