Yes you should advertise on branded keywords. Often you will have competitors bid on your branded keywords with aggressive offers to steal your loyal customers.
What are branded keywords?
Branded keywords will contain the name of your brand within the search phrase which will be closely tied to your products, service, value proposition etc.
Let’s say you are a clothing retailer and your name is John Doe Clothing and you sell leggings and exercise tops. Below are some examples of branded keywords:
John Doe, John Doe Clothing, John Doe legging.
When is it important to bid on branded keywords in paid search?
- If you operate in a competitive industry, then advertise on your banded keywords in paid search because others will definitely do it
- If its easy for customers to switch, then advertise on your branded keywords to have your offers, value proposition and new product messaging in front of your loyalty customers, to ensure you are on top of their mind
- If you have a lot of products and services, use advertising on branded keywords as a way to up-sell, cross-sell other products
There is a differing school of thought around advertising on branded search terms. If they are searching for branded terms, they are most likely going to convert, so we should not spend $ on advertising to them. I would just remind them that cost of acquisition is high, where as cost retaining a customer is low. So, it is well worth the investment to ensure that you do not lose them to competition especially when they bid on your terms.
To ensure that existing customers are being given more relevant messaging, it is good to use first party audience as an extra layer on your search campaigns so you can show more relevant messaging based on whether they are a customer or not for the same keyword.
How can you find out if competition is showing ads on your banded terms?
You can use the auction insights report in Google Ads to understand the other advertisers who are showing up on specific keywords. It will give you details like the % of times when they appeared along with you, the % of times when their ad appeared at a higher position. You can break the details by time period to understand any seasonality associated with competitions ad spend on your branded terms.
Is there a specific case/example to show that competitors advertise on a company’s branded keywords?
Yes, below is an example of SnapChat advertising on branded keywords for Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit. These screenshots are from Dec, 2019.
Utm parameters helped me dissect their paid search strategy. They have a paid search campaign running on Google called “G_Search_Competitor_CA_Alpha” with unique Adgroups for each of the advertisers below:
- Adgroup called “FacebookAds” for Facebook
- Adgroup called “GoogleAdvertising” for Google Ads
- Adgroup called “TwitterAds” for Twitter
- Adgroup called “RedditAds” for Reddit
Their had a very clear offer called out in those ads as a sitelink, when none of the brands they were targeting had any offers on them. This is a case of an aggressive competitive conquesting strategy where you are going after their branded keywords with an aggressive offer better than them.
While Google and Facebook were showing ads on their branded keywords, Twitter was not. Only Google’s ad appeared at a higher ad position than Snapchat.
