Should We Stop Bidding On Brand For AdWords

What is Brand Traffic?

A common practice with Google Adwords experts is to set up a “brand” campaign. A brand campaign is a campaign made up of keywords of your own brand name. For example, if you’re a plumber with a company name of “Big Dave Plumbing,” your keywords will all contain the words “Big Dave Plumbing.” Your ads should also call out your brand name in the first headline, and you usually want to include a ™ or © symbol next to your name.

Why do you need a brand campaign?

When you have a brand campaign, the idea is that when someone searches your business name, you show up first. When someone types in “Big Dave Plumbing,” they expect to see the top result be about “Big Dave Plumbing.” When they see your ad, they’ll click on you and you’ll get the customer that you’ve already worked hard for in the past. These searches are already looking for you. Don’t let them get distracted by someone else’s Ad that says “#1 Plumbing Service.” Some people know what they’re looking for and will scroll past that Ad until they find you organically. Other people will just click on the top result, and if that company also solves their problem, they might go with them instead!

Brand campaigns are not only important if you have poor organic search performance. Brand campaigns are crucial to protect yourself from competitors ad campaigns. Any good Adwords consultant knows how powerful a competition campaign can be. We have clients that have almost completely built themselves off of the brand of other companies. Million dollar companies were built going after their big name competition, but offering a more affordable package. If someone is searching for you, don’t lose them!

Brand traffic also tends to be very cheap. Often, if you’re paying $2 per click on your brand term, your competitors could be paying $4 or even more. This is because Google Adwords favors the most relevant search results and is willing to make it cheaper for the most relevant advertiser. As you can imagine, if someone’s searching for you, you’re the most relevant! However, if you’re not there, your competitors will have to pay less per click, and they will steal even more of your traffic.

There’s one big exception why you might not want to have your brand campaign set to always show in the top search result. That’s the case if your brand name is a more generic word, or a common actual name. In these cases, you might end up with a lot of people who aren’t looking for you, clicking on your ad and wasting your budget. Of course you should still set up your brand campaign, and let the data drive the decision of how high to set your bids. If the cost isn’t worth it for the lead/sale, then it’s just not worth it. A good Google Adwords management company should still always create a brand campaign. They just have to be mindful of the performance of this campaign, just as they would for any others.

Final Thoughts As An Expert Adwords Consultant

Being an experienced Adwords consultant, I implore you to have a brand campaign running. You might be shocked by how cheap you can pay for clicks when it’s your own traffic. If you’re a special case, it might not make sense to be the #1 result every time, but you can only know this by testing.