Should You Bid On Your Own Brand Name?

One question that we regularly get asked in the Paid Media team is “should we bid on our own brand name when we rank number one organically for it?”. It’s a fair question, rooted in logic and concern over wasted spend. The answer however is more complicated. At Distinctly, we generally advocate for bidding on your brand name, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for everyone. Here we’ll cover the key reasons for doing so, and what factors make it a sensible choice not to.

Reasons To Bid On Your Brand Name

1. Brand protection

The first and most common reason for bidding on your own brand name is to stop competitors from doing so. There is no rule against bidding on a competitor name, and unfortunately users do have a habit of clicking on adverts without properly reading them.

Clickup are a good example of a business who understands the importance of brand protection. Without their ad taking the first position on the page, users would get the targeted Monday.com ad first:

While this is a deliberately evocative advert, there are plenty of businesses who accidentally target other companies through poorly managed keyword matching. The broader your company name, the more likely you are to become a victim of this.

2. Flexibility of messaging

On the more positive side, the flexibility afforded to a brand through their search ad copy can be extremely valuable. A sale for example can be promoted through the brand advert and include:

• Fresh copy, only seen within a set timeframe
• Sitelinks encouraging users to head deeper into the site (e.g. mens sale vs womens sale)
• Promotion extensions with discount codes
• Countdown’s with the number of days/hours left

Seasonal messaging is key to a number of businesses, and for this reason it’s wise to keep the brand ad copy accessible and in alignment with other channels.

3. Increased conversion rates and click throughs

One major benefit of the flexibility mentioned above is the ability to optimise brand adverts for higher conversion rates. Testing different calls to action, changing the landing page or offering incentives are just some of the ways you can influence the conversion funnel.

Some brand clicks are also likely incremental, meaning if paused the same volume of users would not necessarily reach your website regardless. So you have to weigh up the cost against the impact of less traffic and lower conversion rates. 

Let’s take a theoretical example of monthly stats from a brand campaign:

Clicks	20,000
CPC	£0.20
Cost	£4,000
Conv. Rate	12%
Sales	2,400
AOV	£20
Revenue	£48,000
ROAS	12

The primary question you need to ask yourself, based on the available data, is did the £4K spend pay for itself? Based on the ROAS of 8, the simple answer is yes. But how much of that revenue would have been made regardless? Let’s assume that without the brand advert, you’d lose 15% of the traffic that would have reached the site, and you know that organically, brand traffic historically converts at a slightly lower 10%, with a similar average order value. This would be the result over the same timeframe:

• 17,000 clicks
• 1,700 sales
• £34,000 revenue

So £14,000 less revenue per month, which is 3.5x the cost of running the brand advert. Bearing in mind all the other benefits of running the brand ad, it’s as close to a clear answer as you’re going to get.

Scenarios Where Bidding Isn’t Necessary

1. Limited budgets

Might sound like an obvious one, but if you are running on a very tight budget for advertising, and the focus is on new customers, then brand bidding might not be the best use of your money. In the example given above, if you’re spending £10K per month, and 40% of it is going on brand, there may be more benefit utilising that elsewhere than if were just 10% of a £40K budget.

2. High CPC’s

Cost per click should be pretty cheap bidding on your brand name, in comparison to other campaigns. This is because you are so relevant to the query being searched – it’s in your URL, your ad copy and the content of your landing page. However, if you find that you’re getting into a bidding war with competitors, or you’re matching to lots of different queries due to the nature of your brand name (broader names = more likely to), you may find that your cost per click starts to rise and become unsustainable. As already highlighted, your brand campaign should be a no-brainer profitability wise, and if that stops being the case, then that’s a strong reason to pause it.

3. Confidence that the benefits aren’t applicable

Ultimately, if you:

• Don’t have competitors bidding on your name
• Don’t have a reason to ever change your messaging to the customer
• Aren’t seeing a good return either directly or indirectly

Then brand bidding might not be as essential for you as it is to other businesses, and that budget may be utilised more effectively elsewhere.

Still unsure? Our advice is to gather as much data as possible. Run A/B tests on the impact of brand bidding, challenge the way you are using it currently, and always be aware of changes in your market that may require a pivot in strategic direction.