What is ‘brand bidding’?
To ensure a paid ad appears when a user is searching in Google or Bing for your product or brand, ‘brand bidding’ is required. This process involves bidding on your ‘brand keywords’ within the particular interface, and brand keywords can include phrases such as ‘brand review’, ‘brand website’ and ‘brand subscription’.

What are the key benefits?
There are many benefits; search marketing blogs are overflowing with case studies and recommendations that discuss the need to focus on brand-centric keywords for PPC success. Some of the key benefits to highlight include:

1. More traffic & exposure - maintaining a consistent presence across both paid and organic listings means you’ll generate more cumulative clicks from search engines. If your brand appears both in the organic and the paid areas, more users are likely to find it.

2. Stronger sales messaging - paid ads are purpose-built and can use sales-focused messaging to grab a potential customer’s attention. They can also be directed to a specific web page, with an offer that matches the offer listed in the ad. Organic listings are not as easy to control. Webmasters have some control over what text is displayed, but in the end Google reserves the right to modify search result snippets, and very often does. The messaging and user experience from organic listings may drive traffic, but not necessarily sales.

3. Guarantee your place in the search listings - Google and Bing change their algorithms regularly, so you can easily be caught out by an update which impacts your organic rankings and traffic. But with a paid ad for your brand, your presence in the search engines is always guaranteed.

4. Ensure competitors don’t appear above you in the search listings - Google and Bing will allow any of your competitors to bid on your brand. So if you are not bidding on it too, a competitor can easily get their paid ad appearing directly above your organic listing.

5. Push negative reviews down the search listings - sometimes a negative review about your product can pull through into your organic listing and appear when people are searching for your brand. Running paid ads therefore pushes these links further down the page. Furthermore, as paid ads are purpose built, you can also add text or sitelinks to your ads to directly overcome or address any particular issue.

6. Be there when someone wants to buy - users often start a search using very broad and generic search terms while they are researching what they want to buy. They often then do various other searches, before finally making the decision to buy your product. So at this last stage in their digital journey, they may actively search for your brand with a high intent to buy, so a paid ad, with strong offer and sales driven text, makes it very easy for them to know where to click through to buy.

7. Provide customer choice - some people do prefer to click on organic listings, but others prefer to click on paid ads. Wouldn’t you like to provide potential customers with the choice?

In conclusion…
Some clients worry that bidding on their brand keywords is going to cannibalise the subscriptions they’re already generating for free via their organic listings, but having both paid ads and your organic listings is likely to increase your ability to incrementally increase your sales volumes. In tests conducted by Jellyfish Connect, with paid brand ads paused, total sales dropped by as much as 61%! Yet sales from the existing organic listings only increased by 4%.