Brand bidding
What is brand bidding?
Brand bidding means running paid search ads on keywords that carry your own company, shop or product name. Those clicks are usually cheap, because the ad matches the search closely. Google also lets competitors buy your name as a keyword, while it does restrict how a trademark may be used inside the text of an ad.
Example
A furniture company gets 1,200 searches a month for its own name. Its organic result sits first and collects about 480 clicks. A brand campaign at €0.08 a click takes 300 of them for €24, and organic clicks fall to 300. If 180 of the paid clicks would have arrived anyway, the campaign bought 120 extra visitors at €0.20 each.
The sum changes the moment a competitor advertises on the same name. Without a brand campaign the first thing on the screen is somebody else’s offer, and part of those 480 clicks goes to them.
Why it matters for a business
The argument about brand keywords is an argument about incrementality: are you paying for visitors you would have had anyway? That is measured, not assumed. Pause the campaign for two weeks and compare total clicks and orders, not the advertising figures alone.
There are cases where a brand campaign pays for itself: a competitor bidding on your name, a seasonal offer the organic listing does not mention, resellers ranking above you, and control over the headline and the link a buyer sees first. Brand keywords usually carry a high Quality Score, so the click stays cheap.
Two limits are worth knowing. Google does not stop competitors from buying your name as a keyword, but it does restrict the use of a trademark inside ad text once the owner files a complaint. And broad match can attach brand keywords to searches that have nothing to do with you, which is why brand and non-brand campaigns are kept apart.
What to ask
- Who is advertising on our name right now, and since when?
- How many brand clicks are additional rather than taken from our organic result?
- Are brand and non-brand campaigns separated in the report?
- Is the trademark registered, and has a complaint been filed where it appears in someone else’s ad text?
Whether a brand campaign earns its place is decided from the account’s own numbers, as part of our work on Google Ads.