So why bid on your company name? This question soften comes up a lot with our pay-per-click (PPC) clients. Cutting to the chase… Here’s what we tell them.
1. Basically, you need to take advantage of organic and paid listing locations. Currently, search traffic comes from about 70% organic and 30% paid. By not using a paid search campaign you are potentially losing 30% of your potential traffic. In addition, search engines usually place organic rankings below two or three paid ads plus other information (i.e. local search.)
2. You have more control over copy content, placement, destination URLs, landing pages, and optimization of ads than with natural listings.
3. Your search results page, even if highly ranked and optimized, is limited to the user’s query/page content and META description. This is why I still recommend adding meta tags to your site even if these tags are not as important as they once were.
4. With an AdWords placement, you “control the message”, meaning you can use it to promote specials, enforce branding and messaging, conduct A/B testing on copy, landing pages, and user interaction.
5. If you are using Google, your company or brand can appear in their content network. Obivously this has it’s ups and and downs, but can good for increasing your market reach.
6. You can use it as a defensive strategy against competitors biding on your name. Yep, fight back against those sneaky people trying to take your potential customers away with special offers, etc.
I’ll keep adding to this list so check back often.
What others are saying.
Per iMediaConnection:
“The initial report concluded that 92 percent of the brand names observed in Google and Yahoo! paid listings had third parties positioning against brand keywords. Further, an average of nearly 11 paid listings existed for each brand. The nastiest portion of this business is witnessed with third parties using the brand name in the listing itself.”
They go on to say…
“of the brands monitored, 45 percent had paid listings with competitive or unlicensed offerings while 23 percent had listings with related commercial service offerings, leaving only 7 percent of listings purchased by the brand owner. 25 percent of listings were concluded to be for “other” services which might include ubiquitous eBay and Amazon listings, among “other” third parties.”
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/4146.asp
Eyetracking Studies
People gravitate towards the top of the page where the sponsored ads are. This is known as the golden triangle. Enquiro does a great job demonstrating this concept with their eye tracking studies. You can read more here: http://www.enquiro.com/AllPrompted-sm.jpg
One thing to note. If we have access to a clients web analytics, we recommend comparing organic keyword conversions v. paid search keyword conversions. This will give you a good idea of what keywords and market niches you should be bidding on and exploring.
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