PPC - Pay Per Click Management

When it comes to determining how to target traffic in PPC, there are a few different routes you can go down. The best idea is to bid for keywords relating to the topic of your PPC campaign, as these tend to provide the best conversion. However, you also have niche keywords to target with low CPCs, with also negative keywords helping to prevent your campaign bidding for the wrong keywords too.

Another strategy for keyword bidding comes with brand bidding – this is the process of bidding on competitor brand names directly in PPC (yes, Google does allow this). If you are unsure whether this is a good strategy to go for or not, here are five reasons it is a good idea to bid on brand names in PPC.

1. Contextual traffic – How do you gain traffic that is genuinely interested in your PPC campaign? You use keywords that suggest just this. The great thing about bidding for a brand name is that the fact the web user is searching for it automatically tells you that they are interested in that topic. Without realising it, you can determine quite a lot from the traffic that are bidding for a brand name.
2. Potentially high converting – Those that search using a brand name tend to be web users that are close to converting for that brand. Take the example of someone buying new headphones. If they were searching ‘best headphones’, ‘buy headphones’, ‘where to buy headphones’ or, pretty much, anything relating to headphones, they are not as likely to convert as someone bidding for ‘beats headphones’ or ‘buy beats headphones’. This is because the web user has not decided specifically what pair of headphones to purchase: that is still up for grabs. When a web user searches for a brand, they are already sold on converting and making that purchase, increasing the likelihood of a conversion for yourself, if you were to lure the web user into clicking on your advert.
3. Stealing traffic from competition – As well as you gaining traffic, you are also preventing traffic from reaching your competitor. So, in some ways, you can look at it as a win-win situation. This tends to be a reason why companies bid for their own brand name, to limit the damage limitation this causes in PPC for their own brand name.
4. Directly compete against the competitor – The fact that you know you are directly competing against a specific competitor means you are more able to tailor your PPC search advert to compete against the competitor. You don’t have to worry about any other competitors, since you are trying to convince the web user to go with your advert rather than clicking onto a link relating to the brand name.