Bidding on Your Own Brand Name: Your Smartest PPC Investment

A potential customer hears about your business from a friend. They excitedly search for your company name on Google, ready to visit your website. But instead of finding you at the top, they see a competitor’s ad first.

This happens many times a day, across every industry. Competitors can legally bid on rival brand names to capture the attention of people looking for someone else.

For most small business owners, paying to advertise your own name feels counterintuitive. You’ve worked hard to build recognition in your niche. Why pay when people already know who you are?

Let’s explore why bidding on your own brand name might be one of the smartest, and most affordable, parts of your PPC strategy. (PPC just means pay-per-click, where you only pay when someone clicks your ad.)

What is brand-name bidding?

Brand-name bidding is when you pay to advertise on searches for your own business name. Your ad shows up as a sponsored result above Google’s normal organic results. Businesses do this to grab extra visibility and protect their brand from competitors.

Defending your brand from competitors

Competitors can legally bid on your brand name and show their ads at the top of any search for your business. A potential customer looking for you might click their ad instead, and that’s a sale lost before you even knew they were searching.

Controlling your brand search results

Brand-name searches usually come with a lower cost-per-click, because people searching your name already have high intent to find you. On top of that, you get complete control over the message in your ad and any offers you show.

You might choose to highlight a new product or a limited-time deal. You can also send people to any page on your website, not just your homepage or whichever page Google decides is most relevant.

When brand-name bidding isn’t necessary

Some businesses won’t need to do this. That includes businesses with unique names and no competition, those with very low brand search volumes, well-established local businesses with no nearby rivals, and industries where competitors rarely bid on other brands.

Defensive versus offensive bidding

Everything so far has been about defensive bidding, where you protect your own brand and control the results so you don’t miss customers looking for you.

There’s also an offensive option, where you bid on competitors’ brand names to grab extra visibility. We won’t cover it in detail here, but it’s worth knowing there are legal implications, especially if a competitor has trademarked their name. In those cases you can’t use their trademarked name in your ad text.

Offensive bidding can also spark a retaliatory bidding war, which pushes up costs for everyone. For most small businesses, the defensive option is the better choice.

If you’d like a hand setting up smart, cost-effective ads that protect your brand, get in touch through our contact page. We’ll keep it simple.