Big Branded Bidding Boondoggles

Bid on branded queries or nah? The great debate rages on. I often hear people pointing to Google-funded studies that conclude that your brand terms convert more with paid clicks than organic clicks. This very well may be the case. I have known many people that are very keen on bidding on branded keywords, and I suspect that it’s because the rest of what they do isn’t working, and they want to have something to be able to point to as a success. I will lay out what I believe to be the strongest cases against and for bidding on branded terms.  

If your website’s organic listing reliably captures clicks from branded queries the vast majority of the time without paid ads, then I see no need to bid on branded terms. Not sure? Search console will tell you. If your website reliably captures that traffic, great! If not, what’s wrong? You may have overlooked some “low-hanging SEO fruit” by not having your sitemap or structured data correctly reported to search engine spiders. Get your shit together, resubmit, then see how things change.  

Do a search for your brand on all your devices. Guess what: Google knows it’s you and tailors the search results you see to you (as it does for everyone), so this may not be a very good representation of reality. So find some friends and ask them to Google your brand’s name, and send you a screenshot of what loads above the fold. If your website is consistently at the top of the rankings organically, excellent! If there are paid ads, then we should consider the use case of ‘defensive branding’. 

 Many business names are descriptive of the business itself. This tends to be useful in many things, but is often a detriment when it comes to search terms. If your company name is ‘[CITY] Plumbers’, then there is a great chance of confusion when people are searching for your company name versus a plumber in that city.  

Some business names don’t describe the business at all. If you have some unique business name that’s not likely to get confused for something else, then you have hit the branded search jackpot. Chances are, you won’t need to bid on branded terms. It’s still a good idea to check your search console stuff to make sure that people aren’t conquesting you. 

 Let’s say your brand terms aren’t getting conquested at all. Is there still a case to be made for bidding on your own keywords? Maybe…which brings us to the challenge of attribution. So far, Google Ads has made it so that display campaigns only ever get last-click attribution, regardless of what your conversion actions’ attribution models are set to. So if your attribution models are set to linear, your search campaigns will get linear attribution, but your display, video, etc. campaigns will only get credit for conversions they helped cause if they were the very last ad click before the conversion.

If you’re doing a good deal of display advertising, there’s a good chance that people will eventually just search for your brand terms when they’re ready to convert, rather than click on the display ads. If you’re getting thousands of display clicks each month, it may be a good idea to bid on your own terms just to get the full picture of your attribution. 

Think of it like a billboard: have you ever clicked on a billboard? No. But if you’ve searched for a brand after seeing a billboard, the billboard did its job, but the search ad you clicked on appeared to get the credit. 

In this, as with everything else, the decision on whether or not to bid on branded terms ought to be made on a case-by-case basis. Whatever you decide, I recommend checking back at least every few weeks to see if it’s still a good idea. If you started bidding on branded terms as a defensive play and see that your competitor has stopped conquesting you, maybe you can take your foot off the gas and spend that money on something you’re not already getting for “free”? If you’re not bidding on branded terms, search on a variety of devices and accounts that you haven’t used before and see if you’re getting conquested, and go from there.  

There isn’t one right answer, but this is my understanding of it. 

If you do want to bid on branded terms, I recommend making at least one standalone branding campaign, instead of a branding ad group within an otherwise non-brand search campaign. Brand keywords and non-brand keywords are inherently different and should be treated differently in different campaigns.