Why you need to bid on your brand keywords with Google Ads

- [Brad] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole, and today I've got a quick tip for you on the importance of bidding on your brand terms within Google. So I've done a quick Google search for Microsoft Office and you'll see that Microsoft is bidding on their own brand. And you might be thinking to yourself, why would I need to bid on my own brand's terms when I already show up number one in the organic search results? Well, it comes down to what your competitors are doing. Here I've done another search for Google Ads, and you'll see that Google is also bidding on its own term, but so is Adobe. And another example, I did a search for Google Analytics, and a competitor is showing up with the first ad slot. So this happens quite a bit in a competitive landscape. Your competitors are likely going to bid on your brand terms which means you need to gain the upper edge so that you can make sure that they're never taking that top slot away from you. Now the truth is, it's a free market and as long as your competitors don't use any trademarked terms within the actual language that shows up in their advertisement, then they're free to bid on your brand name keywords. In fact, you'll often see that competitors will put your brand name in their URL, since that tends to get passed the copyright review. When you target ads on your brand name however, the cost that you pay will always be cheaper than your competition, because you're landing page, and domain name are always going to be more relevant to the target keyword. Within the AdWords bidding structure, it's not simple the highest bidder that wins, and if you wanna learn more about that bidding structure, check out my course right here on AdWords, where I go more in-depth in that algorithm. But ultimately, the relevance of your landing page to the keywords that you're bidding on are going to play a role in not only how high your ad shows up, but how much you pay. So as long as you are the actual brand that you're bidding against, you will always be able to demand a lower price, which means you'll always outperform your competition, and you'll always be paying less for the click, which mean you hopefully will push them out. Now this could create a little bit of a bidding war, and that's competition for you. But if your keywords are that valuable that your competition is willing to pay that much for them, then they're likely just as valuable to you. So I encourage you to take some time this week and go through and set up a basic ad for your top-level brand keywords. Thanks for checking in this week, as always, I'd love to hear from you. So connect with me on LinkedIn, or follow me on Twitter via @bradbatesole and let me know if your bidding on your brand terms. Also, feel free to send a question my way and I might just cover it in a future episode. I'll see you next week.