Part of PPC advertising evolves around the concept of tracking traffic from the brand names of your competition. After all, there is nothing stopping advertisers doing this and can be seen as a win-win situation: you are gaining contextual traffic as well as hindering the performance of your competitors. However, as good as this is to bid on other competitor brands, it does also mean you will have your competition bidding for your own brand name, in an effort to steal away traffic from you. Here are a few ways you can look to protect your brand and the traffic you should be receiving from your brand name in PPC.
 

Remember Trademark in Adverts Is Not Allowed

It is not allowed for your competition to be including trademarked terms of yours in their search adverts when they bid for your brand names (or any other search phrases/keywords for that matter). It can be quite difficult to find out when advertisers are doing this. But, at the minimum, you can report any campaign that uses trademarks when you see them bidding on your own brand name. This will remove the advert from bidding for your brand name.
 

Bid On Your Own Brand Names

This sounds obviously to do. However, there are many advertisers that don’t see the reason to bid for their own brand name. There are a surprising amount of benefits to doing this, though:

• Brand name bidding tends to bring in high quality contextual traffic that are likely to convert
• It acts as a deterrent to stop competitors bidding for your brand name
• It allows you to change the link you want the web users to go to, when they search your brand (which is not possible through organic search without a lot of SEO effort)

Start a Bidding War

This isn’t an ideal situation at all. If competitors are still bidding on your brand name and you are having traffic stolen from you in PPC, then a way to deter competitors further is through starting a bidding war. Although there are many reasons to not get into a bidding war, sometimes it is the only war to put advertisers off the idea of bidding on your brand name. At its simplest, competitors bid for your brand name because they see value in doing this to their campaign (as well as negatively affecting your campaign) – there is a quantifiable return on investment (ROI) that looks good to bid for your brand name.
If you push up the CPC of your brand name, then naturally, the appeal of bidding for your brand name declines, until advertisers reluctantly remove the brand name, since it is not benefiting their campaign or producing a healthy ROI. Yes, it will cost you quite a lot to perform this. You can counter this by saying how much will you save by putting off competitors from bidding on your brand name (and how much extra traffic you will gain) in the long term compared to a short term bidding war.