Branded PPC Campaigns: Why Target Your Own Brand?

Why Target Your Own Brand?

Branded PPC campaigns are a key part of an online marketing strategy. They focus on promoting your business brand through paid advertising on search engines like Google or Seznam. In practice, this means targeting your own branded terms.

• Keep Competitors in Mind

Company brands are highly searched keywords, which means that your competition may start targeting your brand.

It’s not always true that users who enter your company’s name into a search engine are automatically committed to purchasing from you. Competitors are aware of this and may try to divert your potential customers. In such cases, when a user searches for your brand, it’s highly likely that your competitor’s ad will appear in the top positions.

“While this practice is considered unethical in marketing, there is currently no explicit law in the Czech Republic regulating ads targeted at a competitor’s brand. Resolving disputes can be difficult and costly, often involving legal proceedings that take time to reach a final decision. However, despite these challenges, there are ways to address the situation, typically requiring patience and support from an experienced lawyer.”

Competitors can also target your brand unintentionally. This happens when they aren’t actively focusing on your brand, but their ad still appears during searches. For example, when a potential customer searches for a keyword related to your brand (e.g., “VUCH handbag”), your competitor’s ad might appear due to the generic part of the keyword (“handbag”). Unintentional targeting can also occur when your brand name is a common keyword itself, such as “modadeti.cz.”

Remember, competitors that aren’t targeting you now can start at any time.

• Good SEO Isn’t Enough

Clients often ask us whether it’s worth launching a branded PPC campaign if they have well-optimized SEO. From a PPC specialist’s perspective, the answer is: yes, it’s worth it.

If competitors start targeting your brand, your organic result could appear as low as the 5th position. The first four spots are typically occupied by ads. Remember, organic results are “natural,” meaning they’re generated by algorithms aiming to provide the best match for a given keyword.

Another major advantage of PPC ads compared to organic search is that ad text, unlike organic results, shows up almost immediately. This is particularly beneficial for promoting time-sensitive offers.

Organic results are generally quite broad and don’t provide as much relevant information as ads. Ads can also include extensions that provide additional information and are visually more appealing, which can increase their effectiveness and capture more user attention.

• It’s Cost-Effective

Branded keywords targeting your own brand receive the highest quality scores. The primary goal of search engines is to provide users with the most relevant results. As a result, click prices for branded keywords are much lower than for other keywords.

• Your Brand Gains More Visibility

The more you appear in search results, the higher the chance users will click on your ad. As we mentioned earlier, users who search for your brand name aren’t always 100% committed to purchasing from you.

By properly setting up PPC ads for your brand, you increase the likelihood that potential customers will choose your offer.

How to Set Up a Successful Branded Campaign

By now, you likely have a good understanding of how branded campaigns work and their purpose.

Properly setting up a branded ad campaign impacts not only increased visibility but also boosts click-through rates (CTR) and improves the ROI of your marketing efforts.

The main goal should be to minimize costs while maintaining efficiency. If you have strong SEO and little competition, your branded campaigns might be redundant and could unnecessarily cost you money. That’s why it’s crucial to continuously monitor the situation, test different approaches, and optimize your strategy to pay the least while achieving the best results.

For example, bid strategies can sometimes lead to unnecessary increases in cost-per-click (CPC), which can negatively impact your campaign’s efficiency. That’s why it’s often better to use manual bidding or at least set a bid limit for these campaigns.

It’s also important to remember that branded campaigns often result in low CPC and high conversion rates, which can reduce the overall cost-per-sale. However, you should remain cautious and not get carried away by great results. We recommend monitoring the cost of sales for generic campaigns separately to avoid neglecting other campaigns with high acquisition costs or order costs.

→ If you’re still unsure how to set up your campaigns and feel you need a helping hand, we’re here to assist you.