What is Brand Bidding in PPC Advertising?
Understanding the concept of brand bidding
You choose the keywords against which to place bids in a paid search. Brand bidding is placing a bid on your branded keywords or those of a competitor. This promotes a brand ad for anyone searching for your brand or allows you to promote your products or services on your competitors' brand names.
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Benefits of brand bidding in PPC campaigns
Brand bidding offers three core benefits and, as such, has become a mainstay of digital advertising campaigns.
01. Brand protection
Bidding on your brand allows you to control how your brand is represented to people looking for it in the search results. This can be important when competitors or other third parties decide to bid on your brand name.
02. High performance
Branded search terms often convert highly because the user intends to find your brand. They offer a very cheap cost per click (CPCs) as your brand will be by far the most to the query.
03. Competitor conquesting
If you have a product you believe is superior to your competitors, running paid ads against their branded terms can allow you to interrupt their customers' journeys and turn them into yours. This is particularly common for advertisers in categories with low generic search volume, little product differentiation or free trial offerings. Competitor bidding is commonplace in categories such as price comparison and B2B SaaS
Common challenges in brand bidding
Those who engage in brand bidding may need help with several problems.
01. Non-incremental return
Bidding on your brand terms when you are already ranking in position 1 for organic search runs the risk of paying for traffic you could have received without a cost. The balance between paid and organic traffic is something we discuss at greater length here, but there is a common pushback from advertisers that they don't want to pay for people already familiar with their brand. The most surefire way to judge whether to use your brand name as a keyword is to run incrementality tests. Read about conversion lift tests here.
02. Inflated costs due to competitor bidding
If you decide to bid on your competitor's terms and they bid on your branded terms, it can lead to mutual cost inflation. For every advertiser in the search engine auction, the cost required to acquire that user becomes higher. That said, bidding on your brand for protection is usually best practice if a competitor is bidding.
03. Competitor bidding is an expensive way to acquire customers
Being relevant to the terms you are bidding on is a crucial driver of costs in paid search. When bidding on your competitor's terms, your message and landing page will never have high relevance as the user is fundamentally looking for your competitor rather than you. The conversion rates for these terms can also be low, making competitor bidding unsustainable for many advertisers.
Effective Ways to Bid on Your Brand in Google Ads
Optimizing bids for brand keywords
Optimising for brand keywords should not be forgotten just because it is your brand. We’d always suggest a structured programme of testing:
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Bid strategy
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Conversion goals (based on volume)
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Ad copy
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Landing page
Google Ads offers built-in features for A/B testing; these should be used even for brand terms.
Leveraging brand name and benefits in ad copy
As the user searches for your brand, you should reinforce your brand's benefit and message with the ads you are showing. When there is competition for your branded keywords, you should counter any threats that may be posed. This might include responding to discounts or feature callouts from other brands. For example, a competitor might highlight their service levels compared to yours or offer a trial that you don't. Your ad copy should counter these to avoid losing clicks to competitors. You should constantly look at your users' search behaviour through search term reports and engagement metrics and use this to optimise your brand message.
Utilizing ad extensions for brand awareness
You should utilise all available ad extensions for your brand. This allows you to cover and maximise space in the search results with opportunities generally not available to competitors for branded ad terms. Extensions also offer a way to reinforce your brand message in the face of competitor bidding. We’d suggest testing all available combinations of extensions available to get the best mix for your specific situation.
Measuring success with brand bidding metrics
ou should use the same metrics to judge your brand campaigns as others, expecting them to perform better than other campaigns. It would be expected to see significantly higher:
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Click-through rates (CTRs)
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Conversion rates
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Average order values (AOV)
Lower CPCs should drive this. It is worth noting that if no competitors are bidding on your brand, then performance will most likely look amazing. However, competitors' appearance can quickly impact this, so contingencies should be made when budgeting.
Dealing with Trademark Issues in Brand Bidding
Legal considerations when bidding on branded terms
Search engines such as Google and Bing will abide by local trademark laws. This means that ads that infringe on your registered trademark or cause confusion to consumers are not allowed.
Protecting your brand against trademark infringement
If you detect competitor or third-party ads showing against your trademark terms, you can request that the search engines stop the advertiser from doing this. We have outlined the process of reporting these infringements in Google here, but it is worth noting that this can be slow. If you still need to register the trademark for your brand, there is little you can do if your competitor wants to bid on your branded keywords without contacting them directly.
You can also take legal action against anyone infringing on your trademark, although the law surrounding this is challenging to prove.
If the party bidding on your trademark is a partner, such as a reseller, you should have terms that clearly state whether brand bidding is permitted. Often, disputes are best resolved with the party bidding, coming to a mutual agreement rather than threatening legal action.
Controlling affiliates bidding on your brand
Brand bidding in affiliate marketing has long been an issue. By default, your affiliate terms and conditions should include restrictions on how affiliates can use your brand name and what keywords they can bid on. Most advertisers will not allow affiliates to bid on their core terms as that inflates codes and heavily restricts how they can use their brand name in their ads to protect the brand. Using a tool like Marcode means you can automate monitoring this and remove offenders from your affiliate programme.
Monitoring competitor brand bidding activities
Brand monitoring is essential if you want to protect your brand. Services like Marcode check your keywords constantly across various locations in a way that is challenging for humans to do manually. This gives a comprehensive view of all the ads that appear against your brand terms and allows you to take the necessary actions.
Defending your brand reputation through PPC campaigns
If risks to your reputation appear on your trademark terms, the fastest way to combat them is often by using brand bidding. This increases costs and pushes them out of the auction while you get them removed through other means, reducing the risk that ads appear damaging to you. We'd always recommend bidding on brand keywords when a threat is present.
Automating brand bidding
Devising a brand bidding strategy can be a complex undertaking. Marcode allows you to automate this with our Micromanager product. This uses our data to enable you to create rules to activate or deactivate ads. These are completely customisable and include:
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Organic positon
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Competitors present
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Type of ads competitors appear in
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Number of competitor ads
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Location of competitor ads
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Time of day
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Day of week
This will ensure your ads show when you want them to, but it will also save you money when there is no competition and someone already familiar with your brand is searching. This also automates reacting to increased competition far quicker than manual analysis.
