5 practical reasons to bid on your own brand terms

If you are an advertiser, your biggest fear is that your competitors are bidding on your brand terms to get their ads higher in paid search results. These disruptive behaviours can result in lost sales for you or your company. To protect against these undesirable behaviours, you must bid on your brand terms (brand bidding). There are five distinct reasons why this is a wise choice:

• Protect against the competition.
• Control your message
• Get information about the keywords
• Secure conversions at the final step
• Push new products or services.

Reason 1: Protect against the competition

If you’re a business owner and advertiser, you’ve likely noticed that your competitors are bidding on your brand terms to get their ads higher in paid search results. That’s not good for business. It can hurt customer loyalty and ultimately result in lost sales for you or your company. It would be best never to let your competitors do this to you. Instead, you can take matters into your own hands by bidding on your brand (brand bidding) in Google Ads, which will help protect your brand against this undesirable behaviour.

Check the examples below from Zoho Projects:

Competitors aggressively target Zoho Projects users through paid search ads, promoting their project management tools as better alternatives. Front, Odoo, Zenhub, and ClickUp are leveraging Google Ads to attract users considering or currently using Zoho Projects by emphasizing their unique features, cost-effectiveness, or security advantages. These ads suggest a competitive landscape in the project management software market, with multiple players vying for attention and market share from Zoho users.

This strategy of targeting specific keywords related to Zoho Projects in their advertising is a classic example of competitor bidding, where businesses bid on their competitors’ brand names to redirect potential customers to their services.

Reason 2: Control your message

Naturally, there are many benefits to having Google Ads control the ads that pop up on your searches. It’s easy to forget that it’s not always good when they decide what you see in your search results. To counter this, write a top-notch ad with your desired headline and stick it in the first position of search results. You can then use that ad as your test audience. Make sure that you tweak the copy, the image extension, the calls to action, and anything else that makes it a masterwork. This way, you’ll know exactly what message is getting to your audience without worrying about what Google Ads will say with their automated ad writing platform.

Check the example below from Workamajig, a marketing project management software. On the left, you can see the organic result from the query “Workamajig”; on the right, you can find the search ad for the same query. Note that the ad doesn’t promote the blog or the client portal and focuses on pricing and features.

Reason 3: Get information about the keywords

Google search ads is an underused tool for market research. You can, for example, find which queries lead to more clicks and conversions to your brand. With that information in mind, you can fine-tune your overall brand message.

Reason 4: Secure conversions at the final step

For a lot of industries, competition is fierce. After investing a lot of money in generic keywords, you should also protect your brand’s top position for your brand query when your prospects are in their final steps to convert. Taking this final step is a big deal, so you should take caution to ensure that you’ll convert as much as possible.

Reason 5: Push new products or services

This is related to reason 2: because you can control your message on search ads, you can try to push a new product or service when prospects look for your brand. For example, you can talk about a new product collection and inform your clients that you just moved to a new location and are now covering a new area. You can also talk about new products and services you plan to introduce shortly.

And you? Are you bidding on your brand terms? Let me know more.