“Aren’t we wasting money if we are in that space anyway?* is something your Manager may ask. Time and time again studies have show that brand bidding is in your best interests and it is important to understand why.

Here are some reasons why you should not only be brand bidding BUT you can also show the financial impact of ROI when you brand bid vs ROI when you do not brand bid.

Dominating the SERPs

Your brand may be dominating the space here but if you did not bid on your brand terms, other people would occupy the high profile space. Your SERPS position would be pushed further down the page – meaning loss of visibility and reduction in traffic.

Controlling your brand messaging

With brand bidding, you can change messaging, use site links, call out extensions, etc. to really draw the users eye and drive them to specific, relevant pages on your site to buy – conversion rate is likely to be higher because of these abilities.

Sitelinks are not 100% manageable

Whilst you can ask Google to delist some sitelinks which appear in your SERPS, you cannot actually request that specific links be set up. Think about it – if you could change your own sitelinks as and when you wanted, you would effectively be doing what brand bidding does just now – meaning lots of companies would stop brand bidding!

Competitor bidding

Battling competitors that are bidding on your brand terms (do you want other companies to be appearing when people search for your brand?). You have to be in that place during key promotional times and you want your brand to be seen alongside the competition. If you are not in that space, they will be

Long term page one dominance

Some schools of thought suggest that as Google look to continually test and refine algorithms and monetisation of homepage SERPS, natural organic traffic may be pushed so far down page one that the impact of the Organic traffic begins to erode and you then have to spend just to be in that page one space – an interesting thought and one I’m inclined to agree with.

Brand terms are economical

In retail an average CPC of .12p is common – brand campaigns will no doubt provide the best ROI of all your campaigns. It does not cost a lot to run Brand campaigns vs other channels.

How to prove Brand Bidding works

I can easily show you how to show to your senior management why you should be running brand bidding and what the financial impact of not running brand campaigns would be – not many articles will show you the monetary impact of not running brand so here goes:

Illustrative Example:

Run a brand campaign for a month and track your clicks and total conversion plus sales. During that period there was a total of 81,377 clicks to the site of which 11% were from the Brand campaign via sitelinks. This means the campaign generated 8,951 clicks.

Now look at the average conversion rate over that period for organic traffic (0.61%) and apply that to the 8,951 clicks above. In the campaign I specifically tracked, this would have resulted in 55 transactions at an AOV of £142 – a total of £7,819 in total.

Now apply the conversion rate for Brand Bidding paid search campaign to the 8,951 clicks. In this case Brand Bidding returned a 1.5% conversion rate – at an AOV of £140, this meant if we had been running Brand Bidding for this period we would have sold £19,065 – which is over twice the ROI we would have generated had we not been Brand Bidding!

That is exactly why you should be bidding on your own brands.