Some retailers and traditional advertising agencies are not keen on using a company’s brand in a PPC campaign. There are two main reasons why I believe not using your brand power in PPC is a poor decision. These two reasons are not necessarily the ones cited by marketing managers as they might be hesitant to admit their real motives.

First of all, ‘brand management’ has always been the traditional marketing agency’s ivory tower. It is what they do and in a way, it is the only thing they do. Very little of their advertising spend has an accurately measurable ROI. These agencies do not want to cede any ground to PPC marketers because it is an area they tend to have very little expertise in and they just feel threatened. It is easier to convince their clients that brand bidding is pointless in PPC advertising and to retain exclusive control over a client’s brand.

Secondly, their clients listen because they are cost conscious. They spend large amounts of money on building their brand in the traditional media so why would they spend any more on PPC? Obviously, if consumers are searching for their brand on search engines that means they already know the brand. No need to spend even more money on PPC ads. All they need to do is sit back and hope that the consumer actually finds their site. Right?

As retailer, you are now reliant on the fact that your site shows up on top of the natural search results for the query that the user typed in on the search engine. This is a fair assumption if you have a well established website which was built using SEO best practices. But it is also a fair assumption that your competitors are bidding on your brand and that their ads will appear above you natural listings. Consumers are a fickle bunch and a well written ad might persuade them to shop at your competitor instead.

In addition, consumers will find numerous ways to misspell your brand name. Are you sure your site will come out tops for each of those misspellings? In PPC campaigns, Google will match your ad automatically to its misspellings and with one ad, you can target all those consumers who otherwise might never find your site.

Finally, more and more people (like myself) type a brand name into a search engine (it’s so tedious to type the ‘www’ and the ‘.com’) and expect the search engine to come up the with the site we’re looking for. Just check out the popularity of these two brands on Google. Do you really want to rely on natural search results to drive this traffic to your site?

Yes, it does not seem fair that you need to pay for your brand name in PPC campaigns when people could find your site through other means, but that is exactly what search advertising is about: making it easy for people to find what they are looking for.

PPC based brand bidding is not expensive relatively to bidding on more generic terms. Google will give you an excellent quality score when you bid on your own brand which means CPCs will be really low. But there are quite a few caveats which you should take into account when outsourcing your brand bidding to a PPC marketer. I will address these in a next post.

To conclude for now: brand bidding constitutes an additional cost to your brand building marketing campaigns but the cost is likely to be marginal. And for this marginal cost you can ensure that your potential customers do not get lost on the way to your site. A small price to pay I would say.