Should You Buy Your Name in Adwords?

[SEOhughesm]

While I definitely see the pros to buying your name in Adwords, should you still do this if you have a small monthly budget? I get why large companies like Tiffany's would buy their name because they have the excessive funds to do so in addition to buying keywords. Any guidance or strategy on this?

[BeanstalkIM]

There's basically two ways to look at it and John is right - testing is key.

Getting new business is critical obviously and if they're not yet bidding on your brand then I'd focus there BUT it's worse to pay for that first click and then lose the visitor when they find a competitor on the second query.  So if your competitors are bidding on your brand you need to grab it, the cost per click is less and you can't afford to lose the conversion after you're paid for the first click but you of course don't want to use some of the limited budget on a second click if you could have had it organically.

Then there comes the discussion over the cost to monitor competitor activities vs the cost of just bidding on the brand.  If it costs more to manage it and monitor then just bidding would be the way to go obviously.

Worse case you can test bidding on your brand and monitor the assisted conversions to see how that works out for you.

[ClaytonJ]

Deedra

Two things:

Do you have access to similarweb? If you have a small budget, targeting the referral traffic of competitors for a client can be the cheapest starting point.

Secondly why not test taking brand name adwords offline for two weeks - with the new budget target some new keywords and see what happens to conversions?

[SEOhughesm]

Ok thanks, these are all very insightful responses. To answer your questions, these are brand names and yes people are searching the names to find the companies. And my whole theory was if we have a small budget, then we should just focus on attracting new business. However I do know that competitors ARE buying all competitor names in the industry, but I also know they have larger budgets to work with.

On a side note, my other concern is that people search for a generic keyword, click on our client's ad, then leave, and then decide to google that their brand name later and click on the ad and then convert. Is there a way to target those types of people?

[ClaytonJ]

I agree with Dave above if budget is limited. You are not attracting new customers with bidding on your brand name, just keeping current customers happy with an easy click. That said if you have a reasonable budget it is almost part of doing business as usually your competitors will bid on your brand name if you are not.

[BeanstalkIM]

Part of what I'd be asking is whether your competitors are bidding on your name.  If no one is bidding on your brand name and your site comes up #1 organically then it might be best to put the budget to new visitor acquisition whereas if your competitors are bidding on your brand then you need to protect it.

There area  lot of moving parts to the questions but based on the limited information, that's how I'd look at it.