Is this PPC claim true?
-
I want to optimise our marketing spend and was concerned about the high conversion rate of one of our products. When I suggested stopping PPC I was offered this advice:
'It is vital to keep spending on brand terms to prevent competitors bidding on your brand terms and taking the top positions'
This this true and if so why would anyone want to bid on our brand terms?
-
Since these are branded terms, I would recommend that you do a simple search on Google to see if your competitors are already paying for your branded term. Not all of them do, especially if your branded term is irrelevant to your products.
More likely than not, if you are ranking 1 organically and not paying for your branded term in PPC you will still get upwards of 90% of the clicks. Most people searching by brand already know what they are looking for and where they want to buy it. They will look for your SERP. If you want to test the theory, turn off the paid campaign for a week and see if the traffic on branded terms increases organically or if you see a huge decline in traffic. AdWords is easy to Beta. Maybe it isn't cutting spend altogether, but dropping your bid to position three. Having two listings next to each other is the holy grail of SERP positioning.
-
Hi
If you dont target your brand terms believe me their is a competitor that will. I would advise against giving it to them on the cheap.
It can often look quite powerful if you are ranking well organically and also have PPC adverts at the top of the page.
have a read of this for further insight http://searchengineland.com/bidding-brand-terms-196098
-
Bidding on your brand name(s) is, most often, a very good idea. Many case studies, and my personal experience, have shown that bidding on your brand increases CTR for your organic listings as well. In addition, the CPA for branded campaigns tends to be extremely low and well worth the spend.
Preventing competitors is less of a reason to continue to bid. Even with you bidding, they can still bid on your brand. However, it will cost them much higher CPCs since their Qscore will most likely be poor.
What they've eluded to is that you want to consume as much of the above the fold positioning as possible and having a paid listing next to your organic listing helps achieve that goal.
-
Hi!
A competitor of yours might bid on terms associated with your brand to try to steal some of your branded search traffic. While this is not always the case, if you find it to be true it might make sense to continue spending to maintain those higher ad positions in order to keep most of your branded search traffic.
Does that make sense? Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Correlating Form Submissions to PPC vs Organic - COA
I currently don't use a landing page model. From either Adwords or Organic you reach our site, find the event product that appeals to you, and then fill out the form. I need a way to determine which of those form submissions came from Organic Vs Paid so I can calculate my cost of customer acquisition (COA). Via Google Analytics I can see that X amount of Organic were submitted and X of Paid. If I get 5 submissions in one day there isn't an efficient way to correlate the form submissions to the medium. Any suggestions on an attribute method that would help me sort out COA?
Paid Search Marketing | | fireflyevents0 -
Canonical or noindex for PPC landing pages?
I have two pages for this example. http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes/ http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes-melbourne/ The first URL is an SEO optimised page. The second URL is 99% the same, except that it specifies a city. It's intended use of for a PPC campaign. The first page has major cities mentioned on the page so I don't have to build a separate page for every city variation. The second URL is designed to be city specific for a geographically targeted PPC campaign. The more specific, the higher the conversion rate. Should the second page (the PPC landing page) use a canonical URL (since it's 99% the same) or should it be noindex?
Paid Search Marketing | | designquotes0 -
Starting Out With PPC, Need Some Advice
We are starting out with PPC for our site. I wanted to know what the best starting point is for our site. First, some basic info: We sell thousands of products from a large number of manufacturers We can offer the same prices as competitors, but we can't beat their prices Here are my questions: What would be my USP if my prices are the same, and we have the same store policies as competitors? Is it best to start with product pages (as opposed to keywords)? Meaning, setting up a feed via MC and connecting to our adwords account. Any advice is appreciated 🙂
Paid Search Marketing | | inhouseseo0 -
SEOMOZ of PPC?
Hi The site I'd been following over the years last updated in May, so it's clearly not the authority it once was, I know there's a PPC post here about once a month but I was wondering where do the PPC brigade spend most of their time? My work is 50/50 atm but was once much more PPC focused, is there an SEOMOZ equiv. in the Paid Search world?
Paid Search Marketing | | xoffie0 -
Wordwatch Software: PPC Adwords campaign managers heard of, tried, or actively using this?
I've been trialing WordWatch for about a month. I'll admit I've been skeptical from the start. I don't quite understand the results they're delivering or how it works. So I did a search for "Wordwatch review" hoping someone out there could shed some light or help me decide whether this software was worth keeping. But all I can find are two suspicious and badly written posts, immediately raising red flags. (Penuguin should have eliminated crap sites using the Flesch-Kincaid reading level, but I digress.) **Wordwatch premise: **They take over keyword bidding to maximize budgets and clicks. They monitor the Adwords campaign to find an "optimal" bid price. Two questions about this premise: How is it different than using the Google settings for optimize for clicks or conversions? Since Google Adwords is based on a Vickery auction, wouldn't lowering my bid only lower my position? Bearing everyone has the same QS, then lowering my bids to the range between 2 positions does not increase my actual cost. I have Wordwatch enabled for a few of my campaigns. Their interface leaves a lot to be desired. They don't report the activity or the changes they make to the campaigns from the dashboard. I had to go into my Adwords Change History to track what they were doing. And lo and behold they're also adding long tail keywords to my ad groups. Bottom line I didn't notice any huge impact, and I don't see how it's better than Google's own version of campaign settings. I don't know that they're really legit. But their marketing was so convincing, and they raised $1.4M that I need other opinions. Any one with some pro/cons, or yay/nays?
Paid Search Marketing | | flowsimple0 -
PPC Campaign Setup Fee - Fair?
We already do our PPC campaigns with an agency and we're looking to create another campaign. They told us that the amount of traffic around our campaign would allow for about $2-3k spend per month, possibly with some additional funds placed into display ads. For this campaign, they have proposed a setup fee of $2k and an increased management fee of $750 -- is this a reasonable price?
Paid Search Marketing | | kylesuss0 -
Have you seen a correlation in between running a PPC campaing and increased SEO ranking for a new site (< 3 months old)?
I have read many conflicting articles on this topic. I understand that running a PPC campaign at a launch phase of a site can get a lot of insights such as exact traffic patterns etc. But the question is: is there a correlation or not with increased rankings position for new site as search engine are forced to crawled that given landing page to give your ad a score? Thanks in advance for your answers and opinion
Paid Search Marketing | | OlivierChateau0 -
PPC ad guidelines?
I learned Google PPC years ago and got certified by Google. Back then and for a long time since I know it was best practice to capitalize words in your domain name. I know Google no longer does this and that words in your domain name of your ad are now all lowercase. I hear recommendations and see them practice that adding keywords in a directory are a good way to still get capitalized words in your ad. When I learned PPC, I was told your display URL and your destination URL had to match. Now I'm seeing ads where that is not the case. If I have an ad that takes someone to my homepage of a coupon site, can I have a display URL that says: mysite.com/Coupons Even if the destination URL is just mysite.com ? I'm seeing conflicting things online and it's hard because I don't know what the current guidelines are after this change.
Paid Search Marketing | | DanDeceuster0