The SEM Managers Guide to Brand Bidding

Brand bidding is a fundamental strategy for enhancing pay-per-click (PPC) performance. It’s about turning every search into an opportunity to showcase your brand’s strengths, connect with your audience, and outshine competitors.

Strategically bidding on keywords crucial to your brand lets you know your message is the first thing potential customers see, creating a direct path from their search to your site. Learn more about the benefits of brand bidding below.

What is brand bidding?

Brand bidding is an essential strategy in the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising playbook. It’s a strategy where businesses bid on keywords or phrases intricately linked to a specific company’s brand name in PPC campaigns.

Users who type a brand’s name into a search engine seek something other than that brand. They’re signaling intent, a readiness to engage. Brand bidding swoops into this moment, ensuring your brand or advertisement appears front and center. It’s like having a signboard at the busiest crossroads of the internet, guiding traffic directly to your doorstep.

Brand bidding is also about leveraging the power of recognition. For a company with an established brand, bidding on your brand name can seem redundant. Yet, it can be a savvy move to block competitors from stealing customers, useful to gain page position if your SEO rank is not top of page, or if you want to promote a very specific offering.

This approach capitalizes on existing brand awareness, channeling it into more targeted traffic and conversions. It turns the brand’s name into a magnet, attracting clicks that are already warmed up and more likely to convert.

Brand bidding examples

Understanding brand bidding in theory is one thing, but seeing it in action can help clarify things. Let’s dive into some examples of how you can effectively employ brand bidding:

1. Defensive Brand Bidding: Your brand name is more than just a label; it symbolizes quality and trust. Here’s where defensive brand bidding comes into play. Bidding on your brand name creates a protective barrier around your digital presence. Defensive bidding ensures customers searching for your brand find you over a competitor trying to piggyback your reputation.
2. Affiliated Brand Bidding: Here, you allow trusted partners to bid on your brand-related terms to amplify visibility and sales mutually. It’s a symbiotic relationship where both parties benefit. Your partners gain access to a loyal audience while your brand taps into new customer segments.
3. Generic Product Brand Bidding: This tactic is about widening the net. Instead of focusing solely on your brand name, you bid on keywords related to your product or service. Let’s say your brand is renowned for a specific type of running shoe. By bidding on terms like “durable running shoes” or “high-performance trainers,” you attract a broader audience. It’s about intercepting potential customers who may need to have your brand on top of their minds at a crucial decision-making point and guiding them toward your brand.

Brand Bidding Best Practices

Mastering the art of brand bidding in PPC advertising is like perfecting a recipe – the right ingredients, in the right proportions, can create a masterpiece. Here are some best practices to ensure your brand bidding efforts are as effective and efficient as possible:

• Keyword Precision: Precision counts. Targeting highly relevant brand-related keywords ensures that your ads appear in front of the right audience.
• Quality Ad Copy: Your ad copy is your brand’s voice on the digital stage. Craft compelling, specific ad copy that accurately reflects your brand’s unique selling propositions.
• Competitor Monitoring: The digital marketplace and your competitors are dynamic. Keep a vigilant eye on competitors who bid on your brand terms and submit trademark complaints for take-downs when warranted.
• Quality Score Optimization: Google’s Quality Score is like a report card for your ads. Maintain high-quality landing pages and ensure your ads are relevant to your bidding keywords. This can improve your ad positions and reduce costs, making your campaigns more efficient.
• Strategic Budgeting: Allocate a dedicated budget to brand bidding. This ensures a consistent presence on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), safeguarding your brand’s visibility.
• Negative Keywords: Use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic or to turn ads off on branded terms when you dominate in SEO and/or PLA listings. This helps ensure your ad spend is as efficient as possible, targeting only those genuinely interested in what you offer, and directing traffic to the most cost effective ad units to improve KPI’s.
• Ad Extensions: Ad extensions provide additional information and can entice users. Use these extensions to offer more reasons for users to click and engage with your brand.
• Regular Testing: The digital world and your strategies are evolving. Continuously test and optimize your brand bidding campaigns.

Building a Brand Bidding Strategy

Developing an effective brand bidding strategy requires insight, precision, and adaptability. Let’s explore the foundational steps in this strategic journey:

Keyword Research and Selection

A careful selection of keywords is the cornerstone of any brand bidding strategy. This process begins with identifying keywords inherently tied to your brand, products, or services. It involves understanding your brand’s core values and examining the competitive landscape.

Analyzing the keywords your competitors are bidding on can help you uncover new opportunities and identify potential threats. Equally crucial is understanding the search intent behind these keywords, which allows for the tailoring of your ad messaging to align perfectly with the user’s needs and expectations.

Segmentation and Targeting

After pinpointing the right keywords, the next step is segmentation and targeting. This involves categorizing your brand bidding campaigns into distinct segments, such as brand-specific, generic product terms, and competitor terms.

Segmentation allows you to customize ad copy and bidding strategies for each group, improving relevance and performance. In this phase, the strategic use of negative keywords also plays a pivotal role. By filtering out irrelevant traffic, you ensure that your ad spend is focused and efficient, targeting only those most likely to engage meaningfully with your brand.

Monitoring and Optimization

Finally, monitoring and optimization turn a good strategy into a great one. Continuous monitoring of your brand bidding campaigns provides invaluable insights into their performance. This constant vigilance enables you to adjust your bidding strategies based on real-time conversion data, striking a balance between visibility and cost-effectiveness. Keeping your ad copy updated with current promotions, offers, or unique selling points ensures your messaging remains fresh, relevant, and enticing to your target audience.

How to Protect and Enforce Your Brand

Protecting and enforcing your brand in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is a strategic game of chess. Your moves must be calculated and deliberate to thrive in this competitive landscape.

The first thing you’ll want to do is solidify your brand’s legal standing. Registering your brand’s trademark grants you the power to defend your brand against infringements. Remember, trademark symbols in your ads can subtly discourage potential violators.

The strength of your brand on SERPs is also significantly influenced by the quality of your ad campaigns. Crafting campaigns with compelling ad copy and robust landing pages enhances your brand’s appeal and improves your ads’ position and relevance.

Finally, allocating a dedicated budget for brand bidding and closely monitoring competitors’ activities are critical strategies in maintaining and enforcing your brand’s presence. Adapting your bidding strategy in response to the competitive landscape ensures that your brand remains prominent and influential in SERPs, effectively marking your territory in the digital domain.

Use Affiliates For More Reach & Control

Encouraging authorized affiliates to engage in brand plus bidding can be a masterstroke in your brand’s SERP strategy. Each affiliate can amplify your brand’s presence across various digital fronts on keywords that you might not have included in your own search campaigns. This collective effort significantly extends your brand’s visibility, reaching corners of the digital world that might otherwise remain untouched.

You should nurture the relationship with your affiliates to create a scenario where both parties benefit. Allowing them to bid on brand-related search queries will open doors to increased visibility and sales and benefit both parties.

However, when expanding your brand’s reach through affiliates, it’s crucial to maintain a consistent brand narrative. Establishing clear guidelines for brand bidding and regularly monitoring affiliate activities ensures that your brand’s messaging and values are upheld.

Reducing Competition

Reducing competition in the SERPs is crucial to establishing your brand’s dominance and making it challenging for competitors to encroach on your space. You can achieve this by:

1. Brand monitoring coupled with submitting trademark complaints to search engines for take downs
2. Outbidding competitors on brand-related keywords making it less appealing for competitors to continue bidding on those terms
3. Utilize affiliates and partners to take over valuable search results real-estate to box out competitors on brand plus keywords.

Complementing these tactics is the art of creating ads that highlight your brand’s unique value propositions and differentiators to draw user attention away from competitor ads.

Maintaining high-quality landing pages and ensuring ad relevance is also pivotal in improving your Quality Score. A better Quality Score often translates into better ad positions at lower costs, making it harder for competitors to compete effectively.

How can brand bidding help you dominate the SERPs?

Brand bidding can help you dominate the SERPs by enhancing your brand visibility. When users search for your brand or related keywords, brand bidding ensures that your ads appear at the top. Increased visibility makes your brand more noticeable and pushes organic and competitor listings down the page.

It also gives you complete control over your messaging. Bidding on your brand terms allows you to dictate the information and messaging users see when they search for your brand, allowing you to highlight promotions, key messages, and unique selling points.

A brand bidding monitoring tool like The Search Monitor can further amplify these benefits. These tools provide valuable insights and data to help you refine your strategy and maintain a dominant position in the SERPs.

Ready to see how The Search Monitor can transform your approach? Request a demo today and take the first step towards data-driven success in your brand bidding strategies.