If you work in PPC, there’s a question that seems to come up now and then:
“Why are we paying Google to show our ad when we already rank number one organically”
This is a fair question; bidding on your own brand name can feel like paying someone to point customers towards your shop when they’re already right outside of it.
But, as with most things in paid search, the answer isn’t as simple as a yes or no.
Sometimes, bidding on your own brand terms is one of the smartest things you can do with your PPC budget. Other times, you could simply be paying for clicks that you would have received organically anyway.
Let’s get into whether you should bid on your own Google Ads.
What do we mean by bidding on your own brand?
First things first, let’s clarify what we mean.
When we talk about bidding on your own brand, we are talking about creating a Google search campaign to target keywords containing your own brand name.
For example, imagine you are a furniture retailer called “Manchester Furniture”
Your branded campaign may target terms such as :
- “Manchester Furniture”
- “Manchester Furniture sofas”
- “Manchester Furniture reviews”
When someone searches for one of these terms, your ad can enter Google’s auction and appear above or alongside your organic listing.
Google will then determine which ads are eligible to show through an auction, taking factors such as the bid, ad quality, or even the landing page experience into account.
So, should you bid on your own brand? The short answer is, sometimes.
There are several very good reasons to bid on your own brand terms, but there are also circumstances where it makes very little commercial sense.
The most important thing is not to treat branded PPC as an automatic activity. Instead, ask yourself “What additional value is my brand campaign creating?”
If the answer is “it protects our traffic from competitors, gives us more control over the SER, and drives incremental conversions”, then that’s great.t
If the answer is “it gives us an excellent ROAS because people were already going to click on our organic result,” then we may have a problem. Let me break it down.
Why should you bid on your own brand?
1. You can protect your brand from competitors
This is probably the biggest reason to run branded campaigns. Imagine someone searches for your brand, you rank first organically, but a competitor’s paid ad appears above you.
Now, your potential customer is being presented with an alternative before they even have reached your website.
Your branded ad allows you to occupy that paid position and make sure your messaging is front and centre.
This becomes particularly important in competitive markets where competitors are actively targeting your brand terms.
Research into branded search advertising has found that the value of brand ads can change significantly depending on whether competitors are present on the results page.
The question isn’t simply, “do we rank organically?” It’s “what does the entire search results page look like when someone searches for us?”
2. You can control the message
Your organic listing is useful, but your paid ads give you another opportunity to control exactly what the customer sees.
Whether you have a new sale running, you’re launching a new product, or offering free delivery, you can show this to potential customers more easily through ppc.
For example:
Manchester Furniture
Up To 40% Off Sofas | Free Delivery This Week
This could be considerably more compelling than an organic result simply showing your homepage.
This is particularly useful when you’re running time-sensitive promotions, where you want to make sure your most important message is visible to people already searching for your brand.
3. Branded searches often have very high intent
If someone is already searching for your brand name, the likelihood is that they are already very interested in what you offer.
They may have seen you on social media, or been recommended by a friend; whatever the reason, branded searches are often much further down the funnel than generic searches. That means branded campaigns can produce very high conversion rates and ROAS figures. But this is where you need to be careful. A brilliant branded ROAS doesn’t automatically mean your branded campaign is generating incremental revenue.
The big problem is cannibalisation
This is the part that makes the “should we bid on our own brand” conversation interesting. Cannibalisation occurs when a paid click effectively replaces a click you would have received organically anyway.
So for example, if someone searches “Manchester Furniture”, your organic result appears first; however, you have a paid ad above it. The user clicks on your paid ad & Google records a conversion. This may seem great; however, if that user would have clicked on your organic listing anyway, you haven’t necessarily created an additional sale; you’ve just simply paid for the route that they took to get there.
This means that the money that you had spent on the click may not have generated genuinely incremental revenue. This is why looking at branded campaigns in isolation can be misleading.
Your campaign might have fantastic CTR and conversion rates; however, it may be contributing relatively little value.
Does this mean that you should switch your brand campaign off?
Not necessarily; this is where we need to avoid falling into the other trap. Just because some brand traffic would have arrived organically, doesn’t mean all of it would have. If you switch your brand campaign off, you need to understand what happens next.
Will your competitors start appearing?
Will your organic traffic increase?
Will your total website traffic decrease?
Research found that pausing branded paid search increased organic clicks, but resulted in a much larger overall loss of brand traffic, illustrating why simply comparing paid clicks with organic clicks can give you an incomplete picture.
When you probably should bid on your own brand
There are a few situations where branded PPC becomes valuable:
When competitors are bidding on your brand
If a competitor is appearing above your organic result when someone searches for your brand, your branded campaign can act as a defensive strategy.
You are effectively protecting the traffic you have already worked hard to generate.
When you’re running a promotion
Got a seasonal offer? A new product launch? Limited-time discount?
Brand campaigns can give you an additional opportunity to communicate that offer to people who are already actively looking for you.
Why let someone search your brand and see an outdated organic result when your paid could show your offers for you?
When you are a newer or less established brand
If your organic visibility isn’t particularly strong yet, branded PPC can help make sure people searching for you actually find you.
When might you not want to bid on your own brand?
When nobody is competing with you
If you are consistently ranking first organically, nobody else is bidding on your brand, and your brand campaign isn’t driving conversions, you could be paying for traffic you would have captured anyway. This is going back to the cannibalisation scenario.
A large-scale analysis of search results found that brands frequently advertise on terms where they already rank organically, including branded searches where competitors aren’t present. This doesn’t mean that every one of those campaigns is wasteful; it means it’s worth asking the question.
When your brand budget is taking money away from non-brand
Let’s say you have a £20,000 monthly PPC budget
You spend £2000 on brand and £18,000 on non brand
If that additional £2000 isn’t generating meaningful revenue, you could be sacrificing opportunities to reach completely new customers.
Personally, I’d much rather see a PPC strategy that is using budget to grow demand rather than simply harvest demand that already exists.
Don’t judge branded PPC on ROAS alone
This is probably the biggest takeaway from the whole blog. Branded PPC should not be judged the same way as every other campaign.
If someone searches your brand and they convert, it is very easy to give that conversion to Google Ads and celebrate the 1000% ROAS. But attribution isn’t the same as incremental. Instead, look at the wider business picture.
Consider:
- Total branded traffic
- Organic brand clicks
- Paid brand clicks
- Total conversions
- Revenue
- New customers
- Blended ROAS
The objective is to understand what would have happened without the campaign.
That’s much harder than simply looking at the Google Ads interface, but it is also much more valuable.
How can you test whether your brand campaign is actually working?
If you are unsure, test it: run a controlled experiment where you reduce or pause branded activity for a defined period and compare the results against an appropriate baseline.
Have a look at what happens to:
Paid traffic – your paid brand clicks are likely to fall.
Organic traffic – are your organic brand clicks increasing? If so, by how much?
Competitor activity – do competitors start appearing more frequently? This is arguably one of the most important things to monitor.
Total conversions and revenue – If paid clicks fall by 50%, but total conversions remain completely stable, that’s a very different story to paid clicks falling by 50%, and revenue falling by 30%
New customer acquisition – If your brand campaign is helping capture customers who have been exposed to your wider marketing activity, switching it off could affect acquisition more than you expect.
Ultimately, you want to understand the impact, not simply channel-level performance.
In conclusion…
The answer is yes, you should consider bidding on your own brand, just don’t do it blindly.
If competitors are bidding on you, you’re running promotions, your SERP is crowded, or your testing shows a meaningful impact, branded PPC can be extremely valuable.
But if you are not ranking organically, nobody is competing for your brand terms, and your paid clicks aren’t adding conversions, you should seriously question whether that budget could be better spent elsewhere.
Don’t bid on your own brand because that is what you always do; bid on it because you have a clear commercial reason for doing it.
