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Should I Run a Branded Paid Ad Campaign?
Let’s start at the beginning for this question that many business owners ask: What is brand bidding? Brand bidding in the PPC world means creating a paid campaign in your AdWords account that targets your company’s name (and different versions of it). While paid campaigns are usually targeted around specific services or products you want searchers to buy or book, there are benefits of running branded ad campaigns as well.
What Are the Benefits of Running a Branded Ad Campaign?
There are many benefits of brand bidding for your company’s name. We’ll walk through these in more detail later in this post, but for companies looking to grow their business and get more leads, running a branded ad campaign can:
- Maximize your online real estate
- Highlight special offers and competitive differentiators
- Prevent competitors from stealing branded traffic
- Drive more customers through your sales funnel
- Keep traffic from going to your competitors
- Result in better quality scores in your AdWords account
Who Should Run Branded Paid Ad Campaigns?
Any type of business can run branded ad campaigns. While they might be most common with B2B companies and retailers (who likely have much larger and integrated marketing campaigns), small business and service companies can definitely benefit from running branded ad campaigns. Below we outline the benefits of branded paid ads, but enter your URL below to get a FREE analysis of your current PPC campaigns from one of our specialists:
Why You Should Be Running Branded Ads in AdWords
Maximize Your Online Real Estate
With running paid ads targeting your branded company’s names in the search terms, you’re able to show as much as possible in the search results (for the paid ads and the organic results). This has been shown to increase your click-through-rate (CTR), getting more visitors to your site and in your funnel as potential revenue.
Another benefit of running branded ads for you company is that it could decrease the prominence of review and directory organic listings (where users are more likely to encounter competitors’ information). This can keep competitors from stealing your branded traffic by showing up in those review sites that may rank well organically.
Paid ads can also divert attention from any organic links ranking on page one, if reputation management in the search results is something you’re having an issue with.
Keep in mind, if you don’t run branded ads, a competitor (or many competitors) could run ads for your branded keywords and appear before your website’s organic listing.
Mention Special Offers & Competitive Differentiators
Your website likely ranks #1 when you do a branded search for your company, and often you’ll find you have organic “rich snippets” underneath that tell users what your company is and provides quick links to important pages on your website. While these are helpful in gaining more real estate in the results page, they are unlikely to mention any special offers or competitive differentiators—which is where a branded ad campaign in AdWords can help.
Paid ads are written to convince users to click and drive them to specific landing pages, in addition to the home page link that ranks well organically.
Below you’ll see an example for Blue Corona. The first set of links is for our branded ads paid campaign, while the second is the first listing organically. Both feature rich snippets, but what they’re enticing users to click on is different (and we have control over the paid options).
In the paid ads, we’re able to send users to a specific landing page that encourages them to contact us about our services. Underneath that, we provide our proven process (a differentiator for us), a free website analysis (special offer), and case studies (social proof). In the organic listings, it features more about career opportunities, about our team and company, and the news and blog.
Drive More Customers through the Sales Funnel
Just because someone searches for your company name in Google, it is not a guarantee that they will convert into a lead (and eventually potential customer). In fact, consumers are performing more and more research when making a buying decision (and going to Google to do that). Likely some trust has previously been established with these users searching your branded name to learn more about you. With paid ads that hammer home your value proposition (as explained above), they are more likely to convert.
Get Better Quality Scores
Branded keywords are highly relevant to the search query, your ad, and your site, so they will have high quality scores. This helps make the clicks cheaper and can improve your account-level quality score. This is beneficial for adding new keywords in your AdWords account as a whole (not just the branded campaign) as they start off with better quality scores. Win-win for your branded and non-branded paid ad performance!
If You Don’t Bid on Branded Keywords…
If you don’t bid on branded keywords, you should exclude branded terms from your other campaigns because you don’t want people to click on an ad when they search for your company name in combination with another one of your keywords (e.g. “Landers Cooling Company furnace repair”). Those clicks will likely be much more expensive than a branded click would be. Also, even if competitors’ ads don’t show when you search only a company’s name, you can bet they will show for these type of combined keyword searches.
Want to Set Up a Branded PPC Campaign?
When you’re ready to set up a branded PPC campaign, or want help with your paid search strategy in general, Blue Corona is ready to help. When you contact our team for PPC services, we can help you:
- Figure out how much you can afford to pay per click
- Determine your monthly PPC budget
- Track your PPC success with our Web and call tracking services
- And more!
Give us a call if you’re interested in learning more about our PPC services.
About The Author: Hannah is the Organic Team Lead at Blue Corona. If she's not busy daydreaming about the training session for her team, you can find her improving client conversion rates and planning her next trip.
View more blogs by Hannah Nelson
The information on this website is for informational purposes only; it is deemed accurate but not guaranteed. It does not constitute professional advice. All information is subject to change at any time without notice. Contact us for complete details.
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