Why You Should Bid on Your Company’s Own Name in Search PPC

Search engine marketing (i.e. “pay per click”) trivia 101 – Should you bid on your company’s OWN name?

*drum roll*

Definitely Yes!

In fact, this is one of those no-brainers that cause un-necessary controversies among search engine marketing professionals.

Why?

1. If your site is properly “SEO“-d, then your site should rank #1 for your own name anyway.


2. You shouldn’t have to pay search engines to bring people to your site when they are looking for it anyway (i.e. racketeering)

I totally agree with point #2 Middlemen should not have to get paid when they provide zero value. BUT unless you own these search engines, you have to play by their rules.

Here’s why you should always, and i mean ALWAYS, bid on your own domain name.

You will ALWAYS Rank #1

Why? Search engines care about their reputation.

Imagine if you type in “BMW” and see an an ad from Ford or Hyundai or Kia.

Would that look like a relevant search engine results page to you? Nope, it does not.

The reason why search engine companies became so big is that they show you relevant stuff, whether they’d be organic or paid.

If people are searching for your company’s name and you don’t show up, search engines are training people to think that their stuff can’t find the right information… and eventually would switch to a different search engine.

If they lose searches, they lose money.

And because you will always rank #1…. you will get:

Insanely high CTR & insanely low average CPC

If your domain is “bmw.com”, would CTR (click through rate) for BMW be higher on “bmw.com” or some other domain?

Yes, BMW.com would kill the CTR on both the paid and organic results.

And if you have high CTR, you will pay insanely low CPCs.

For example, I was bidding on some very expensive keywords that averaged around $9-$12 CPC.

If you had an aged domain with a great brand value and lots of ad history spend, you could probably optimize your ads to get 1%+ CTR at quality score of 6-8.. which could potentially mean that you could pay around 1/2 that (around $5 to $6 CPC).

Good deal right?

Well, it turns out when I bid on the actual domain name, actually two AWESOME things happened

1. conversion rate shot up 130%


2. average CPC dropped to sub $3

For that vertical, average CPA (cost per action) was around $150 when I started the campaign… and when I bid on the domain, the CPA dropped to around $50.

Your Rich Competitor Will Dry to Bleed You

If your competitor is heavily funded or has deep pockets, they will bid on your domain name and brand name.

Even though that sounds evil, it’s completely legal.

If your company has no paid search campaign AND you’re in highly competitive industry like insurance, software, etc, there’s a high chance that your competitor is probably bidding on your name because search engines are now favoring more real estate to paid search marketers over SEO.

In those competitive verticals, paid results can make up more than 60-70% of the SERP (search engine results page).

Yes, the competitor will pay more CPC, but their tactic might be to just try and bleed you to death, not necessarily turn up profits.

Secret is Out: Paid & Organic Results Go Hand in Hand

For many years, lots of SEO people were wondering if they can better organic results if they pay search engines (i.e. via PPC)… and now, there’s no doubt about it.

In fact, Google even wrote about how you can optimize both organic and paid results from their adwords dashboard:

Yeap. Gotta pay to play.

If you’re praying to the SEO gods and doing the rain dance to get you some free traffic, good luck.

SEO-only is like playing the Russian roulette, and that’s why I don’t do SEO at all.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/bid-companys-name-search-ppc-0729450?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bid-companys-name-search-ppc