At first, the argument that you don’t need to buy ads for your brand if you rank organically makes sense. Why would you purposely buy ads that will (generally) be displayed above your organic positions and pay for clicks on keywords that you could get free clicks on? Why would you spend time and money managing a campaign with your brand keywords when you have organic positions for them? But is this really true? Are you wasting your money on brand ads when you have organic positions? I’m going to convince you the answer is no. You should buy brand keywords, regardless of how strong your organic positions are. Here’s why….

1. Ads and organic positions have a symbiotic relationship. Many people think that paying for clicks on ads is a waste of money if they have an organic position on the keyword. But, while there’s no definitive case study on this, anecdotal evidence and observations of BlueGlass client statistics indicate that having PPC ads in combination with organic positions can actually increase sales 15 to 40%. This is hard to test due to all of the variables involved but I’ve personally experienced dramatic decreases in organic brand sales when brand PPC ads were turned off.


2. The combination of ads and organic positions increases brand trust. Whether it is a conscious reaction or not, when users see organic positions and ads for the same domain, they have a higher level of trust for the brand. If the user is researching your brand and your competitors and you are able to influence their decision simply by having an ad on your brand, why wouldn’t you?


3. Brand PPC campaigns can be useful for SEO keyword research. By buying broad match brand terms and allowing Google to match your ads to keywords it thinks are related, you can use your brand campaigns to see how potential customers think of your brand and to find new keywords for organic optimization. For instance, you may see that people frequently misspell your brand in a specific way which you do not rank organically for. You may want to try to rank organically for this misspelling. Or, you may just create an ad group with common misspellings to capture traffic from the misguided consumers. Either way, you have found an opportunity to capture targeted traffic that you would have missed without running the brand ads.


4. PPC ad campaigns can be used to test messaging without affecting SEO efforts. You can quickly test various messaging in PPC ads to see which convert the best. You don’t have this luxury with SEO. You don’t want to change your page titles every few days to see what gets the best CTR and conversion rate. A brand PPC campaign is a great place to test messaging and special offers before making changes to your website.


5. Your competitors are going to advertise on your brand. Unless you have a trademarked brand and have jumped through the hoops to prevent competitors from running on your brand (do that by the way), your competitors are going to run ads on your brand to try to poach customers. If you are unable to prevent them from running their ads, the least you can do is make sure you are there too.


6. Brand keywords tend to have higher quality scores. Having high quality score keywords in your account is beneficial to your account as a whole. Adding a brand campaign is generally an easy way to get some high quality score keywords in your account which may give a small boost to the performance of your other keywords, as long as you are properly managing your campaigns.

I have yet to see a client that did not benefit from advertising on their brand terms in some fashion. At the very least you should test it and see if it works for you. I bet it will!