Brand bidding means running paid search ads on searches for your own brand. Those searchers are already looking for you, so the debate is whether the ad adds anything beyond the organic result just below it. For many SaaS companies the answer depends on whether competitors are bidding on the name and on what the results page looks like without the ad.
Reasons to bid on your brand
- Competitors or partners bid on your name and appear above your organic listing.
- The ad lets you control the message: current offer, pricing, sitelinks to key pages.
- Brand clicks are usually cheap, because your relevance is high.
- It keeps navigational traffic from leaking to review sites or affiliates.
Reasons for caution
Brand campaigns often report the best numbers in the account because people were already going to convert. That inflates blended ROAS and can mask weak non-brand campaigns. Some of the clicks would have gone to your organic result for free.
The way to know is to test. Pause brand ads in some regions or periods, or run a holdout, and compare total brand clicks and conversions (paid plus organic) against a control.
Trademark considerations
Google allows others to bid on trademarked terms as keywords in many regions but restricts trademark use in ad text, subject to complaint and policy rules that vary by country. You can file a trademark complaint to limit use in ad copy, not to stop bidding on the keyword itself in most cases.
Example
Testing whether brand ads pay
Hypothetical company Kestrelbay pauses brand ads in two similar regions for a month while keeping them on elsewhere. In the paused regions, its organic result picks up most of the clicks, but a competitor’s ad picks up some too. The team keeps brand ads on, with a lower budget cap.
Common mistakes
Mixing brand into non-brand campaigns
Brand searches flatter any campaign they appear in. Keep them separate and add your brand as a negative elsewhere.
Questions
There is no evidence that paid ads affect organic rankings. The effects are on clicks and visibility on the results page.
