The Importance of Bidding On Your Branded KeyWord
March 10, 2010 by Pablo Palatnik
This morning I was reading, “Brand Aid PPC: Why You Need To Pay For Your Brand Terms,” a post written by Jennifer Robertson on SearchEngineLand. It was an interesting read and topic for me personally because I do own a brand that, although may not be a brand as big as Nike or McDonalds, nevertheless, still a brand.
Looking at our analytics, our branded keyword is the keyword that drives us the most traffic and actually, the keyword that also converts the best. I think that will probably hold true for most e-commerce sites or service related sites that drive a good amount of traffic to their website and their brand becomes what is being searched from word of mouth or simply a user wanting to get back to the site and typing the address in Google or just the site name.
Jennifer makes some really good points in her post that started to make me think, wait…maybe we should be bidding on our brand term. Our mentality, as she states is that of many, is hey, we rank #1…well we own the whole page for it but theres no use I guess to bid on it while we drive the traffic free to our site. But what happens? Not all users click on organic results as there are those who do click on paid results and for almost every keyword, even that of your own site, you have sites such as BizRate, eBay, Amazon, and others bidding on those terms.
“…In addition, keep in mind that only 70% of users click on the organic search results. Considering that, the inverse translates into considerable missed opportunity. In other words, if your brand is not present in the paid search listings, you could be missing out on 30% of your potential traffic and revenue. Bidding on your branded terms eliminates that risk and allows you to dominate the search results page and capture all of your potential traffic.”
So, what if a user is trying to get to your site, but its one of those 30% that will click on paid ads and lands on a BizRate comparison site? Did we just lose that user to save .10 cents or whatever the cost of your branded keyword is?
Also, in the physcological sense of things, some users do tend to give more importance and credibility to websites that have both organic and paid search listings.
Another great reason for bidding on your branded term is you literally have control to change the message of your business within seconds.
“Finally, bidding on your branded terms will allow you to leverage your brand to cross-sell or test new brand messaging. For example, let’s say that your company wants to change its unique value proposition. Obviously, such a significant change would impact all of your online and offline marketing. Given that, you would want to test any proposed messaging changes before moving forward. Bidding on your branded terms allows you to do exactly that. You can quickly and easily leverage your branded PPC efforts to rotate ads using your current value proposition versus the newly proposed one to test which one resonates best with your customers before pushing to a broader market.”
Something we didn’t touch here but on a quick note, if your brand keyword is trademarked, as ours is, you can contact Google and let them know you dont want advertisers bidding on that term.
