Should you bid on your own brand name?
Advertisers often resist the idea of bidding on their own brand terms in Google Ads and other forms of paid search. Advertisers think that the user knows what they are looking for and will scroll down to the organic result--their homepage--and thus they don't have to pay Google to appear number one in the paid results.
However, it's always important for advertisers to bid on their own brand terms. If you are at all established in the industry, competitors will bid on your brand term in paid search, placing themselves above you in the search results unless you take counter-measures. Google places paid results above organic results, so the first thing the searcher sees will be your competitor's ads. What's more, their ads will be written in ways that leverage their competitive positioning against you.
Therefore, it's always important to bid on your own brand term to avoid competitors stealing your brand equity at the last moment. You have spent a lot of money and time driving the user to the point where they think to search for your brand name. It is silly to lose it at the last moment because you don't want to pay Google to protect brand equity you've already built.
The good news is that, since Google knows that your website matches search intent much more closely than your competitors' ads, you will have an easy team appearing number 1 in the paid results and getting high top impression share. Your competitors will also have lower quality scores and thus pay much more for click when bidding on your brand name.
This is just an unfortunate tax that Google Ads imposes on companies to protect their own brand name, although the cost is dramatically outweighed by the opportunity Google Ads provides for most advertisers to get in front of users who would never otherwise search your brand name.
According to Osric Digital founder Dominick DeJoy, who has managed Google Ads campaigns for B2B companies for fifteen years, "Clients often push back on bidding on their brand term because they think it's a waste of money. But it's an important defensive measure. I would even say that brands that are not even running broader paid search programs should still run a campaign for their own brand name."
