An interesting part to PPC advertising, with the likes of Google, is that there is no copyright on advertisers

bidding on brand names – it is a ‘free for all’. This makes things a little complicated, since brands are a crucial part to businesses which are commonly searched for. For this reason, bidding on brand names can be used as both a defensive technique as well as an offensive techniques towards your competition. However, should you do it? To help you with such a decision, here are some pros and cons to bidding on brands in PPC.

Pros to Bidding on Brands

• Wards off competition. Competitors are likely to bid on your brand name if it makes financial sense to do so. This can happen when there is little competition for the brand, making their CPC low when bidding on it. By also bidding against your own brand name, you are automatically increasing the CPC, making it harder for the advertiser to reach number one spot and, if they want to reach number one spot, more expensive.
• To ‘steal’ traffic. Some keywords in your industry might be very expensive to bid on. It could actually make more sense to use brand name for competitors, since it is guaranteed the traffic is contextual if they are in the same industry as you. This also means that you are taking traffic from competitors, ‘killing two birds with one stone’.
• Point traffic to different page other than homepage. If you want your traffic to point to any other page on your website, other than the homepage, then it is effective to bid against your brand, to out compete your #1 organic search result. This is particularly useful when you have just released a new product/service or have a certain discount/sale on.

Cons to Bidding on Brands

• Expensive. Bidding on other brand names can be quite expensive, especially if others have the same idea. This will make it harder to profit from such a keyword targeting technique.
• It is necessary? PPC does allow you to point traffic to other pages, which could be effective when bidding on your own brand. However, what is stopping you sticking a banner in the center of your homepage and using that as a click through page to the page of your choice? It would save on any marketing cost and still get the same results.
• Don’t need to. If there are not any PPC campaigns bidding on your brand name, and you dominate the search engine results page, then there is no reason to bid on your own brand name. Doing so will be a waste of money that could be better used elsewhere.

Ultimately, bidding on brands really depends on your specific situation. I tend to go for the rule of three:

1. Do I want to point my traffic away from my homepage to another page temporarily?
2. Do I want to ward off competition from my brand name?
3. Do I want to take traffic from competition and, potentially, save money whilst doing it?

If you can answer yes to any of the above questions, then you should give brand bidding a go.