Should you bid on branded keywords? The quick answer is yes if:
- Your position in Google’s search results for a given query is too high
- You have a competitor bidding on your company name
Yes and no. Here’s how to determine if it makes sense. First off, bidding on your own branded keywords means you are running a Google Ads search campaign for someone that is already looking for your website / company. If you’re ranking high enough in the regular search results this may not be necessary. How can you tell if you are ranking high enough? What if your competitor is bidding on your brand? Here’s how to determine if it makes sense to bid on branded keywords.
Search Console:
Step 1: go to search console and look up your performance report. You can see all the data for your organic search results here, including branded search results.
You’ll notice that this website had 52.8k impressions with only 795 clicks which seems low and the 1.5% average click through rate backs that up. Why? How could people searching for this business not click on the link to their website when doing a search?
Domain names with common keywords
The website is for a catering company, Farmhousetablefood.com. This explains a lot. There may be search terms for ‘farmhouse tables” that are getting lumped in with the company’s the search results and vice versa. This is one of the main reasons to bid on your branded keywords. If your company name has a common term in it then you may not be at the top of the search results when customers come looking for you on Google. In the above summary we see that the average position is 24.1. That’s very low.
There’s other important information here. For the term “farmhouse table food” there were 199 queries and 65 clicks. Much better than average but still, why not 100% if they were looking for that specific company? Clicking on the query “farmhouse table food” brings up the details.
You can see that the average position is 1.6 which is very strong. So they not losing clicks to a low position. When we run the query in Google we can see that their are options to view images from the site, as well as a link to their instagram account and a Google My Business listing with a link to online ordering through Square.com. So Farmhouse Table Food is dominating this search result and there is no need to do a branded search campaign for this term.
When should you bid on branded keywords
However, this does not mean we should not run a branded keyword campaign at all! There are other queries that are not performing as well. For the search “farmhouse catering” the company is only ranking at an average position of 17.8, well down the list of results. This a search term with high intent. They should run a branded search campaign for this keyword until they get their SEO / search results to improve for this term.
Another reason to bid on branded keywords
In some cases you may find that there are competitors bidding on your company’s name as a keyword. In the example below for a 3d printing company named Goproto has one of their competitors bidding on their company name and appearing above them in the search results. Some people searching for that company may find their competitors sitelink “Instant Quoting Engine” interesting and just like that, the company has lost a sale.
Should you bid on branded keywords? Yes, in all likelihood you’ll have some search terms that you are not currently ranking high enough in Google’s search results. For more information on B2B Google Ads campaigns, click here.