Understanding AdWords.
There are currently about 144,000 Google results for a “should I bid on my brand terms on AdWords?” search, which tells you straight away that this is a much discussed question. There is plenty of conflicting advice out there, but we at Crunch want to give you the facts on why overall, brand bidding is not always the best strategy.
What is ROAS marketing?
Brand name bidding really falls into two categories – your own brand and your competitor’s. Let’s start by looking at bidding on your own brand. Type it into the Google ad preview tool and see what comes up:
We can see that a search for “Crunch Marketing” comes up with no ads, with our brand dominating the organic listings. If your brand name appears like this, then brand bidding is probably not for you. Having an ad at the top of this page could end up costing you for clicks when there is a free click available just underneath.
This is especially true for accounts with a relatively low budget. If you are trying to get your products or services out to as many people as possible, you won’t want to eat up your budget on clicks that you could be getting for free.
Some agencies will insist on bidding on your brand terms on AdWords, even if you have no competition, to make sure that you always appear at the top of the page. However, more often than not, this is just taking away conversions that you would have had anyway from organic searches, and the PPC conversions are just there to make their end of month report look better.
What do you need to do?
It’s all well and good if your competitors are leaving you be, but sometimes your competitors might be bidding on your name and trying to take away your business.