Conversation Marketing had an interesting blog post on bidding on your own brand name. But I’m not sure why you’d slip from organic rankings for your own name:
1. It’s cheap. Pay Per Click engines’ quality scoring algorithms mean you’re likely to get the best deal on your own company and product names. That translates to lower bids.
2. It’s insurance. If you slip from the organic rankings for a day or two, your paid ranking will maintain your presence.
3. Chances are, someone else has your name, too. You’re probably not the only ‘Acme Co.’ on earth.
4. If you don’t bid, competitors will. In the United States it’s perfectly legal to bid on competitor product and company names. It happens all the time. You can easily outbid them, though, thanks quality scoring (see #1)
5. Did I mention it’s cheap?
Nevertheless, these are good points. By bidding on your own brand name, you should be able to get top quality advertising for lower cost. You’ll certainly get lower bid prices than your competition, who are likely bidding on your brand as well. This is a legitimate competitive strategy and it happens in Pay Per Click all the time.
Google’s quality score is based largely on your optimization efforts. Since your website is optimized for your brand name (or it should be), you are likely to have a higher quality score than your competition for that phrase and therefore a lower bid price. Plus, if you’ve done a good job of branding then that Pay Per Click ad should pay off as people search for your brand online. This is especially true if you have a website address that is not an exact match for your brand name. For instance, if BrickMarketing.com had already been taken and I had to choose another domain name – let’s say, brickmarkco.com – then there is nothing intuitive about people typing that URL into their browser to find the company. That is just one more reason to bid on your brand name.
