Brand bidding has become a standard in the Paid Search world. And every marketer either working in an agency or in-house will advocate for having a Google Ads campaign targeting brand name keywords.
Unfortunately, these are often overlooked, and underoptimized by many (sometimes I am also guilty of this) because it is easy to see them as a set-and-forget type of campaign. But this is not the case.
Your branded campaigns can be used to increase your visibility, safeguard your brand name, and increase your marketing efficiency ratio (MER).
So, let’s talk about why, when, and how you should use brand bidding in your Google Ads account.
What is Brand Bidding?
Bidding on your brand is a pay-per-click (PPC) ad strategy where you place bids on keywords that directly relate to your brand name.
If your brand is called ‘Bunny Supplies’, for example, you would run ads targeting the keyword ‘Bunny Supplies’ as exact match type. Nowadays, with Google’s looser definition of ‘exact’, this should be more than enough to cover different search term variations.
With this, you want to ensure that when someone searches for your brand, your paid ad appears right at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). This is pretty much the best real estate on the web.
Why Brand Bidding Matters
Bidding on your brand is about much more than just advertising; it plays a far more critical role in protecting and amplifying your brand in the digital space. It’s much more strategic than it used to be, and much more complex—if you do it right, it can keep your digital presence strong and potent.
One of the main advantages of bidding on your own brand is protecting that brand. It’s all too common for other businesses to bid on your brand name to funnel your customers to their sites. This isn’t just a shady practice; it’s actually allowed by Google as long as the ad copy doesn’t infringe on your trademark.
But it can be bad for your brand’s health. It’s diluting your equity, along with any potential sales, and letting other bidders piggyback on your brand awareness.
Moreover, a frequently ignored advantage is the ability to manage your brand’s messaging. Organic results almost always show a static meta description set by your SEO efforts, but ads let you customize your message.
With brand bidding, you can use your ad to update your overall messaging on Google. Whether that’s to promote a seasonal campaign, feature something key about your service, or just talk about what your brand stands for it is a very powerful tool for narrative control.
Common Objections to Brand Bidding
Even though brand bidding has its benefits, some marketers or agency clients are still uncertain about committing to it.
‘We already rank organically for our brand name, why pay for it?’
In my opinion, this is the most frequent line I have ever heard when talking to clients in the context of branded campaigns, besides the classic ‘Why don’t I see my ads?’. And I get it – the idea of paying for ads when you already rank organically can be counterintuitive.
But with ads, you can be much more flexible with your messaging than you can be with your organic results. So you can include all sorts of promotions you are running, and ad extensions to maximize the ad real estate.
‘It’s a waste of money’
Well, yes and no. In an ideal scenario, you rank organically and people find your website by looking up your brand name, click on the search result, and buy. However, you must also consider competitors. They will put in a lot of effort to steal those customers. And this means bidding on your brand name.
So, to get the money you would’ve normally gotten, now, you have to spend some money on brand bidding to ensure users will visit your website.
Effective Strategies for Brand Bidding
Selecting an appropriate bidding strategy is crucial for maximizing the benefits of brand bidding. There are three main bid strategies used for branded campaigns, but the results are different for everyone. So it is important that you test them out and see which one works best in your case.
Manual bidding (Manual CPC)
For branded campaigns, manual CPC is the favorite in the PPC community. This is because you get full control over the bids. This is not something that Google likes and it will push for automated bidding through the Recomendations tab or Google Reps. But my recommendation is that you ignore them and stick with Manual CPC.
However, manual CPC requires more supervision. You need to make sure the bids are high enough for the ads to be visible, but not high enough that you are overspending.
You can do this by looking at both the Average CPC and the Search Impression share. Try to get them at acceptable levels for you while keeping an eye on the conversion metrics. And don’t try to aim for 100% search impression share. This is extremely expensive and it will impact your overall return on ad spend or MER (depending on which one you use).
Maximize Conversions / Conversion Value
Target ROAS and Target CPA are optimal when it comes to conversion-driven campaigns. So if your branded campaigns have enough search volume to get more than 20-30 conversions per month, you can try it out.
However, because Google’s algorithm might think that some users have a higher probability of converting, it might bid more aggressively. But as with any statistical model, sometimes it is wrong. So, these high bid non-converting clicks will drive up your average CPC.
Target Impression Share
I would say that Target Impression Share is the best option for brand bidding after Manual CPC. This bidding strategy will aim to show your ads for a specific percentage of available impressions.
Again, as with manual CPC, don’t try to go for 100% impression share. Go a little bit below – somewhere between 85% and 95%, depending on the results you get. Otherwise, the bids will skyrocket. To prevent that even further, make sure to have a maximum CPC limit in place.
Which Bidding Strategy Should You Use?
Unfortunately, there is no straightforward answer to this question. It falls under the classic ‘it depends’. But there are some broad guidelines I can give you.
If your business is young and you’re not on your competitors’ radar yet, you might not even need a branded campaign. Most likely your budget is tight and can be used for prospecting campaigns instead.
But once you have grown your business a bit and your competitors start targeting your brand name with ads, it is time to implement brand bidding.
First, you can start with a manual CPC campaign and play around with the bids. You need to establish the benchmarks for the campaign impressions, clicks, click-through rate, search impression share, conversions, conversion rate, etc.
Once you have done that, you can set up an experiment in Google Ads to test whether you can get the same results (or better) with the Target Impression Share bidding strategy. If the results are worse, stick to the manual CPC strategy. If they are comparable / better, implement the new strategy – this will save you some time and effort.
In case your brand has a lot of search volume, and you can’t capture it all because of budget constraints, you could opt for a Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding strategy.
The algorithm will help you focus your spend on the traffic that’s most likely to convert or high-value customers.
Another case in which you want to implement tCPA or tROAS is when you have a large catalog of products and the objective is to generate as many sales as possible. Especially if you have products at a variety of price points. If you have hundreds or thousands of brand keyword variations, automated bidding might get you better results.
Bonus tips
Have you seen a Google search results page lately? You actually have to scroll to see the first organic results. So, using brand bidding will make sure that you are visible above the fold, especially if competitors are bidding on your brand name.
Use the Auction Insights Report
To check which competitors are bidding on your brand name, you can use the Auction Insights Report. This will tell you their impression share, how frequently they have been shown for the same query as you were, or how often they have outranked you.
Use All the Ad Extensions
This goes hand in hand with the previous point. The idea here is to push down the other ads by getting most of the real estate. Here’s a screenshot of a search result. You can see that everything above the fold is only one ad because of the sitelinks.
But you should go beyond sitelinks and use all the ad extensions relevant to your business. Google loves this and you will have better results. Otherwise, your competitors will use this against you every time they get the top spot for your brand name.
Conclusion
Brand bidding is a great way for companies that want to boost their online visibility, safeguard their reputations, and capture the demand.
While you might think that it is a waste of money, there are very good reasons to use brand bidding. And when it’s done with sufficient forethought and intention, it can improve your marketing efficiency ratio by capturing the sales influenced by other channels or efforts.
Brand bidding is an impactful solution, whether you have a young business with a fair amount of competition, a medium-sized company in need of competitive protection, or a large one maintaining dominance.
To make the most of this, understand the strategies involved and customize your approach to your case.
