How to create a successful brand bidding strategy?

Create a successful brand bidding strategy in 5 easy steps

Every business aims for a profitable marketing strategy that can produce subpar results. Creating and optimizing successful PPC campaigns are expected to bring meaningful growth numbers.

This technical and data-driven channel has evolved over the years and ‘brand bidding’ has emerged as one of the best practices.

What do you need to know about Brand bidding?

As the name suggests, brand bidding is all about bidding on one’s own brand terms on the SERPs.

As per the Google policy, the trademarked terms of a brand can be used by its competitors in its own keyword list. However, they are not allowed to use your brand name, but they can run ads that can encourage users to click their ads instead of yours. 

To understand it better, you can take guidance from an efficient digital marketing agency in London. 

Why do you need a Brand Bidding Strategy?

 
The face of the SERP landscape is continuously changing. It’s all about how you respond to competitor’s ad campaigns with respect to it? 

You need an innovative strategy to combat the situation, drive strong returns and reach a win-win position. 

Brand Bidding is a practical and Strategic approach

It is not something theological; it is a practical business approach with defined objectives. The decision to work on this strategy should depend upon your business conditions.

There is nothing as such ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in it.

It is essential to build a customised brand bidding strategy to avoid risk because of someone else’s opinion or anecdote.

Build your own Brand bidding strategy

Defined brand bidding objectives

Your brand bidding strategy for paid search will be a road map for you. Following it step-by-step will ensure success.

The process evaluates:

• Brand bidding objectives
• External threats
• Internal value
• Strategic framework
• Implementation

Every good strategy starts with defining objectives.

A brand bidding strategy should achieve the following goals:

For most businesses, the primary goal will be net profit.

• Brand bidding makes sense if:
  (Branded paid traffic revenue-media spend) + Organic revenue > Organic revenue with no brand ads
• Brand bidding does not make sense if:
  (Branded paid traffic revenue-media spend) + Organic revenue < Organic revenue with no brand ads

Apart from the net profit, you may have other goals as well:

• You may value funnel activities over profit or lifetime value rather than immediate results.
• You may feel inspired by your SERP domination strategy or want to drive up the cost of entry for your competitors to enter their brand auctions.

List down all your objectives to measure and track your success.

1. Conduct Competitive SERP analysis

It is a crucial part of your brand bidding strategy. You need to know if not bidding on your brand is making you lose clicks and revenues to your competition or not.

How to know if competitors are bidding on your Brand Terms?

• If you are already bidding on your branded keywords, you can use Google Ads Auction Insight data to know who else is showing up on the same keywords.
• If you don’t have any branded keywords to identify the auction competition, you can use competitive research tools like SEMrush or SpyFu.
• Simply Google your brand terms, but this will only confirm the presence of competition.

2. Identify the value of your brand ads

Once you know there is active competition in the brand, you will want to know the value of investing in paid traffic.

Brand bidding may seem defensive in nature, but it is not limited to that. There can be a few other reasons like mitigating bad PR, promoting new products, or testing new messages and assets. Revenue considerations are also an important part of it.

Compare the performance of your paid clicks to organic and identify the true

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend):

• Evaluate channel performance with analytics reports.
• Use the paid and organic report in Google ads to identify the overlaps and lost opportunities at a particular keyword.
• Consider pausing a running brand campaign can help you measure its impact. However, it should be a last resort. Introduce new variables to compare the performance between any two periods.

It is vital to know the value of paid traffic as it will help you decide whether you should bid or not, independent of the competition.

3. Build your strategic framework

Once you have analysed the objectives, you should be able to track whether the paid search is beneficial for your business or not.

It is important to map your objectives to initiatives and measurable results.

As discussed earlier, whether to bid on your brand or not, is a question of conditions. Under what conditions should you run or pause your ad campaign?

A framework will offer answers to your specific questions:

• What external or internal problems do you want to solve?
• How aggressive or conservative will your SERP coverage be?
• What will be your budget?
• Which metrics will you use to measure the results?

Segment your goals for better results. Consider goals like:

• Volume: Fully fund brand terms to realise net again.
• Efficiency: A flexible budget based on returns.
• Conservation: No brand bidding until you notice an active competitor threatens to top page coverage.
• Limited defence: Allocate 15% of the budget to direct response and defensive brand bidding initiatives.

A documented strategy defining all the questions including when, whether and, how to bid on a brand will derive growth to your business.

4. Implementation

Now that you have a strategic framework, it’s time to implement. Whether you want to exclude or bid on your brand, your account needs to match.

Exclude brand

If you exclude your brand, exclude the negative keywords active throughout your account. Even if you ‘don’t bid’ on your brand, you are still eligible to participate in the auctions of branded terms.

Continue reviewing your search term reports and, add brand misspellings and variants and negatives.

Bid on Brand

If you want to get the best results from brand bidding, make sure you have the following things:

• Dedicated brand campaigns: Segment your keywords in such a way that branded and non-branded terms do not mix. Segmentation will let you control speed, measure performance and optimise your KPIs.
• Optimised ad copy: Review your competitor’s ads and write more engaging ads.
• High-converting landing page: Swap away the URLs that do not support your strategy.
• Segmented reporting: Different reports on brand performance and other campaigns will help you stay accountable to your KPIs.

And most of all, hire a skilled digital market agency in London to perform the tasks efficiently.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the decision of bidding on your brand should be driven by the strategy. An effective brand bidding campaign is an answer to your business challenges. It will let your business adapt to the changing landscapes and maximising returns.

Replace guesswork with goal-oriented marketing with an effective Brand bidding strategy.