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Should you be purchasing your company’s branded keywords?

In any Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaign, it is important to decide whether or not you will be purchasing your company’s branded keywords. For example, a branded keyword would be “Dell,” whereas a non-branded keyword would be “desktop computer.” This issue often gets overlooked and, in the long run, can create a problem. There are both pros and cons to purchasing your branded keywords. In the end, the decision comes down to what the goals of the campaign are. Is the campaign meant to build brand awareness or to generate leads? Or is it meant for both? Whatever the decision, the purchasing of your company’s branded keywords needs to be addressed from the beginning.

Pros:

Branded keywords are inexpensive. In my experience managing PPC campaigns, very rarely have I seen branded terms that cost more than $0.25 to purchase. In fact, most programs have some form of budget optimizer that will bump the price down. You may receive 100 clicks on branded terms and only pay $10.00, an average of $0.10 a click.

Good for brand awareness. If the sole purpose of your campaign is to drive traffic to your site, paying for your branded keywords is a good idea. This concept holds especially true if your terms are not ranking well in the organic rankings. Instead of a user looking through the rankings, your ad is right at the top under the sponsored links. A brand awareness campaign will get your name out to the world at a cost-effective price.

Cons:

Irrelevant clicks. If the goal of your PPC campaign is to get leads, paying for branded keywords can be detrimental. Most users will click on the first listing they see for your company, whether that be organic or paid. Many of these users will not be interested in completing a conversion goal, but rather just want to get to your site. The best-case scenario is that the user is interested in what you offer, but would have gotten to your site anyway by clicking the organic ranking. So you end up paying for this traffic when you could have had it for free.

A drain on the budget. As discussed, most branded keywords are inexpensive, but nonetheless they do cost something. Paying for branded terms takes away budget from non-branded terms. The users searching for your non-branded terms are more likely to complete your conversion goal because they are directly searching for what you have to offer.

There is no clear answer as to whether or not you should bid for your branded keywords. All of the above factors must go into your decision. Sometimes there are even more factors at play. E-commerce sites tend to bid on their branded terms because of the fierce competition they often face with their resellers. The best way to make your decision is to test your PPC campaign with and without branded keywords. If you purchase branded keywords for a month and see many clicks, but few conversions, it might not be a good idea to continue. If over the next month your traffic stays relatively consistent with the branded terms off then you know your organic rankings are good and you do not need to buy these terms. Above all, you must always understand what the goal(s) of your campaign are.

Tags: pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.