You probably often wonder whether it’s necessary to advertise on your own company/brand name. And it makes perfect sense. When searching for a company/brand name in Google, you almost always will top the search results, right? So why would you even consider advertising on your own company/brand name? Wouldn’t it be throwing money away to advertise for something that generates free traffic on itself?
“Adidas…” search query with branded Adidas ad.
While all these questions make perfect sense at first, we would like to challenge you to think a little further. There are, in fact, several reasons to consider advertising on your own brand name. First and foremost, your competitors could be advertising on your brand name, drawing traffic with high conversion rates (they are explicitly searching for you on the web) away from you. Secondly, advertising on your own brand name allows you to add site links that steer traffic to the right place on your website.
Advertising on your brand name is beneficial
“But what if no one is advertising on my brand name?’ we might say. Great question, as you could be doubting the benefits of paying for clicks in that case. To prove that it can be beneficial, however, we’ll dive a little deeper in the world of data. Besides the fact that SEO is reinforced by SEA and vice versa, we’ll split up both traffic sources and pour them in fancy graphs to prove our point:
As you can see, SEO-traffic (colored in green) is clearly in decline. In October, however, that was all about to change, as we launched a branded search campaign. The total number of website visitors significantly increases due to impact of SEA-traffic (in red). In the right graph, we saw a relatable evolution as regards to turnover. To make sure this wasn’t a coincidence, we recently tested our assumption again:
During a limited period in time, we decided to pause all branded campaigns to see what this would bring… As a result, organic traffic obviously increased with 50%. However, looking at the total picture, we saw a decrease in total traffic of 31% going hand-in-hand with a decrease in turnover of 13%. So, the costs of branded advertising (avg. PPC of EUR 0.02,-) were worth the return after all.
How is this possible?
This can be explained because of the following reasons:
📍 You buy up more space in the search results, making you more present and impossible to miss. Ad extensions such as site links, product links, etc. generate and steer your visitors to the right place on your website.
📍 Advertising on your own company/brand name makes you look trustworthy.
📍 It discourages competitors to advertise on your brand name, as they know it’ll be a battle they’ll never win.
