The keywords a PPC advertiser chooses to select for their PPC campaign can have the potential to make or break a campaign. If you choose too vague a keyword, your advert will be targeting too vague a target market and the CPC will be extremely high making your campaign run very inefficiently. At the same time, choosing too specific a keyword will reduce the ad impressions of your advert/s resulting in your campaign having a decreased responsiveness. This is where the argument comes in whether you should bid for brand names and branded terms in PPC or not. In this article are three reasons why PPC advertisers should be bidding on brand names and branded terms.

#1 Protects Your Brand

First things first is to make sure that the brand you are working towards and are promoting is not damaged in anyway. You do not want traffic searching for your brand and clicking on another search advert because that advert is, in essence, stealing traffic away from you that original searched to find you. For this reason, it is important to bid for your own brand name just to ward off any competition there might be around your own brand name.

#2 Steals Traffic From Competitors

You should bid for your own brand name to ward off competitors – this doesn’t mean you can’t bid on other brand names though. It can be extremely effective to bid for other competitor’s brand names because:

• You will usually find that the actual CPCs of such keyword brand names is relatively low when compared to contextual keywords associated with that brand. Therefore, it can sometimes help your campaign run cheaper.
• You can be sure that traffic that are searching for a brand name are searching for specific things (so it is easy to target the right target audience). For example, if a web user searched for ‘Macbook Air’, you know they are looking for a light portable laptop, such as an Ultrabook.
• ‘Killing two birds with one stone’ – It can often be seen that if you gain traffic from a branded keyword phrase of a competitor, you are doing two jobs at once. 1) you are gaining traffic from PPC to your landing page and 2) you are hindering your competitor’s performance.

#3 Paid + Organic = Synergy

When bidding for your own brand name in PPC, combining organic search results with paid advertising can produce synergy results:

• You will seem more professional and take up more real estate space on search results when bidding on your own brand name.
• Having more real estate on search results will generally result in a higher click through rate.
• You will be preventing as much as possible from competitors stealing traffic away from you from them searching your brand name.
• Your own brand name will have a high conversion rate since the web user has most likely decided to buy or complete the conversion already (hence why they searched your brand name). Therefore, it is worth investing some budget into bidding for your brand name.