An unnecessary cost or a cornerstone of a healthy account structure? Opinions differ when it comes to advertising on your own brand with Google Ads. Here we present the advantages of brand advertising and provide a few examples of when it may be wise to be more cautious.
A question that often arises when onboarding new clients—especially those with little or no prior experience with Google Ads—concerns whether it is a good idea to advertise on one’s own brand. Even though it may seem strange to voluntarily pay for traffic that you would likely have received for free through organic search results, it is most often a good idea to set up campaigns connected to your own brand, commonly referred to as Brand campaigns.
The strengths of brand advertising
An insurance policy for the top position and “ownership” of the results page
Even though there are, in some cases, restrictions on using competitors’ brand names in ad copy, it is generally allowed to bid on keywords related to other brands. This means that competitors can use your brand name as a keyword in their Ads campaigns and thereby appear at the top of the search results when someone searches for it. Traffic generated from searches on your own brand is usually the highest-converting traffic—at this stage, the customer has completed the research phase of the conversion journey and is ready to convert, and specifically on your site. Being distracted by competitors at this point can lead the customer astray and back into the research phase. This risk is significantly reduced by securing the top position on the results page with an Ads placement.
A brand ad with relevant ad extensions, combined with a first-place organic result, also often means securing “ownership” (100% visibility) of the results page above the fold (the part of the search results page visible without scrolling). This has a brand-strengthening effect and reduces competitors’ ability to piggyback on the work you have invested in establishing and building your brand.
Provides more power in optimizing other marketing efforts and Ads campaigns
As established above, brand searches are often the final search a customer makes before converting. If this traffic comes in through organic search, we not only lose the insight that it was a brand search at all (since Google tightly restricts query data for organic search), but we also lose the opportunity to analyze the customer’s conversion journey and see which channels and campaigns led up to the brand search and the subsequent conversion. This is particularly important for the rest of the advertising in your Google Ads account, where a last-click conversion attributed to brand advertising helps highlight the role that more generic keywords play in the conversion process.
A measurement tool for brand awareness and sentiment
One of the biggest advantages Google Ads has over its organic search counterpart is the generous amount of search query data you gain access to and can analyze. With the help of Brand campaigns, it is easy to see how brand awareness grows by analyzing increases in impressions and clicks on brand-related keywords. By using broad match brand advertising (triggered by search queries that include the brand name along with other terms), you also gain the ability to analyze positive or negative associations with the brand or even identify ideas for product development. In short, Brand campaigns in Google Ads have the potential to function as a small focus group in a way that organic search cannot.
Low-cost traffic
Since Google—regardless of whether traffic is organic or paid—rewards relevance in search results, and a search for your brand is about as relevant as it gets, it follows that the cost per click for Brand advertising is generally very low. In fact, Brand campaigns are often where you find the cheapest clicks and conversions in an account. So even though advertising on your own brand involves an investment, it is usually not a heavy one.
Challenges with brand advertising
There are situations where advertising on your own brand requires a bit of extra finesse. This applies, for example, when the brand name consists of a term that is also a common generic search query—especially in a product vertical where the conversion process is prolonged.
For the (fictional) e-commerce retailer hopprep.se (which sells—wait for it—jump ropes), brand advertising would likely lead to irrelevant clicks from searches seeking information, images, or videos about jump ropes and jumping rope. The challenge here is to identify what actually constitutes a brand search versus what is more of a generic search. By working with so-called brand-generic keywords (keywords consisting of the brand term combined with other terms—for example “hopprep se”, “hopprep ab”, and “hopprep e-commerce”), you can identify traffic coming from users who are actually looking for hopprep.se. Remarketing tools can also be useful in cases where the search volume for the generic term is particularly high.
Another challenge for advertisers in particularly competitive industries on Google (for example, the flight search industry) is that competition on one’s own brand becomes so intense that Brand campaigns are simply not profitable from a pure ROI perspective when all players bid on all competitors’ brand names. In such cases, you need to take a holistic view of what it is actually worth to maintain control over your own brand. In some industries, an unprofitable Brand campaign may simply be the cost of doing business if you want to continue growing.
