This is an eternal question that involves both SEO and PPC: Should you be doing PPC on your brand when you organically rank #1 anyway?

From my experience, the short is “yes, of course!”

I recently came across this statistic about Google users and Google Ads on Econsultancy stating the following…

The long answer is “Well, it depends…”

Depending on your business name, it’s not necessary to PPC if your brand name is a word that don’t really exist in the dictionary such as Ebay and Ikea or if you’re using your own name such as John Lewis or Marks & Spencer. Nobody can and will bid on Ebay and / or John Lewis, what’s the interest?

No point bidding on the keyword “Ebay” if you’re not called Ebay…

However, if you brand name includes a name constituted of a keyword relevant to your industry, then you better start bidding on your own brand name and its variation.

Why?

Let’s take an example such as one of our successful clients: Mobile Phones Direct

Straight away, you understand the problem. Nobody will bid on the word “Direct” on its own or not but a lot of people and more importantly competitors will do so resulting in something like this:

Note that I voluntarily remove the “s” from Mobile Phones Direct as loads of people do. You can see that Apple and Samsung genuinely appear before me when searching for my brand…

Some people will look further down and find my natural result but some won’t and this can translate to a loss in easy sales.

I just said “easy sales” because if people already know and remember your brand name, you have made a first good impression. But these users might get distracted by Apple and Samsung’s ads showing before Mobile Phones Direct and therefore purchase from their site.

That’s why you can secure these “easy sales” by bidding at low cost on your brand name as an exact match including misspelling of it so you cover all typos and mistakes people do when typing your brand name.

We drive a very decent amount of sales from PPC on Google via these branded keywords for this client by securing those easy sales.

How?

It’s not rocket science, go for the best and simple ad. Mention your unique selling points (USPs) and what differentiate your business from your competitors. Did you win an award? Do you have a promotion/offer? Free download? Thousands of reviews to show off? Open 7 days a week? Etc…

I went through this optimisation for Mobile Phones Direct in both BING and Google in order to maximise transaction at the lowest possible cost. It works really well.

From a search result perspective, it now looks like that in BING: #1!

Same principle in Google: #1!

Bidding on your own brand requires very low budget and certainly a low maintenance which can be very effective to both increasing conversions (picking up these “easy sales”) as well as reducing the cost-per-conversion.

Remember that the sale is half way done if a user comes back to your website with the brand in mind: that’s called marketing…Just finish off the work!