Brand bidding is often touted as a hotly debated topic in paid media. That said, a cursory glance will reveal that the typical advice given by PPC experts is to bid on it, without exception. But the question is whether this is good advice or just self-serving. Let’s look at each of the main arguments for brand bidding in more detail and see if the answer is a bit more nuanced and not just black and white.
Protect your brand
If you have competitors appearing for brand terms[1], either in paid or organic then yes, you need to consider how you protect this traffic stream and PPC brand bidding is an obvious option, along with improving your SEO rankings. On the flip side, if you have limited or no competition, it really is worth considering pausing branded PPC.
Logic would dictate that if a user is searching specifically for your brand, then they want to visit your site or engage with content. If your SERPs don’t contain competitors and only links associated with properties you own, then the benefits of bidding on brand terms become dubious.
Even if you are convinced that you will lose some brand traffic in this scenario, you need to ask yourself if the incremental value[2] that PPC provides is worth it. Let’s say you lose 5% of brand traffic by turning off PPC brand. What that’s telling you is that 95% of your PPC brand traffic did nothing.
In other words, because you would have to appear on 100% of those impressions to protect your brand loses, a £10,000 brand spend which usually would get a £100,000 return, would actually have an incremental return of just £5,000