Why you might want to pay Google to show an ad when someone searches for your business.

It can sometimes be useful to pay Google to show your advert when someone searches for your business by name.

In geek-speak we call these brand searches.

If you run a brand campaign (buy ads on your brand searches) your ads will show higher up on the search results page. This makes it more likely that the person searching for your business will click through to your website.

Google might still show a link to your website even if you don't buy ads. But that link is likely to be smaller and much lower on the page. This makes it less likely that the person will find you.

But, in my mind the strongest argument for showing ads on your brand search is to defend against other advertisers. You see, Google allows your competitors to advertise on searches for your business name. If you don't claim the top spot someone else can.

The good news is that brand ads are usually not very expensive:-

• The cost per click is often much lower than the cost of advertising your services.
• And, unless you're a very well-known business, you're not likely to get thousands of people searching for you by name every month.

But, even so, we still need to make sure we're getting good value from our brand ads. Doing this starts by thinking about who is likely to click on your brand ads.

You're likely to get clicks from:-

• Potential clients who know your business name from elsewhere. (Other advertising, referrals, reputation, networking etc.)
• Existing clients who want to do more business with you.
• Existing clients who want to contact you for some other reason. (Complaints, check on progress etc.)
• People who want to sell you something.
• Job seekers.
• Junk / spam.

Paying for enquiries from people who might turn into clients is OK. But, nobody wants to pay Google for leads that are never going to turn into new business.

That means we need to calculate the value of our brand campaigns by the cost per qualified lead, rather than the cost per enquiry. (I've written more about this here.)

I usually create a separate brand campaign rather than adding brand keywords to campaigns advertising your goods or services. This allows for using a top of page bidding strategy, and allocating a separate budget for the brand campaign.

I stop brand searches triggering ads in the other campaigns by adding every possible variation of the brand name as a negative keyword.

I prefer to set up a shared negative keyword list for brand keywords and link the list to the non-brand campaigns. This means that you only have to add the brand keywords in one place.

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