When running a Pay-per-Click campaign, the issue of whether or not to bid on your company name always comes up. The conventional wisdom is that you optimize your website on your brand name and capture traffic organically. Accordingly, the paid traffic portion is strictly reserved for introducing new products/services, acquiring new business and promoting specific packages to increase market share.
However, in today’s competitive market, situations do arise where your company’s brand name is used by your competitor to position themselves high on paid search listings. Depending on how good your organic ranking is, this could be a major problem in terms of lost traffic and potentially lost conversions.
Out Bidding Competitors
There are many ways to counter this kind of situation. The more expensive and immediate strategy would be to start bidding on your company name at sufficiently high levels and drown out some of the competitors. This is not always ideal, and the exact direct cost will depend on the number of competitors, the price for the keyword, the ranking you need, average click through rates and the search volume of your company name.
Regardless, it is very important that you maximize the return on the investment in purchasing brand names. That is why it is very important to make sure you use text in your ad that strongly highlights your brand’s attributes and includes a strong call to action. I would also recommend that you use ad text identifying your site as “the official site”. This assures searchers that you are indeed the correct destination they are seeking.
Capitalizing Through Landing Pages
In the past, we have seen brand searches associated with higher conversion rates. So in a way, there is opportunity here. Since these visitors are already aware of your products/services, you can spend less time on educating them about your company and more time actually selling your product/services. Hence, in order to capitalize on the visitor’s familiarity with the brand, you will need to implement a strong landing page from the onset. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Your landing page should have a strong visual draw that highlights the brand effectively.
- It should include a friendly “welcome back” type message to draw in visitors.
- The page should include one clear call to action; for example, “Limited Time Offer - Purchase Now”.
- It is important to not confuse the visitor, so stick with once special offer on this page.
- Also, in case the visitor is not attracted to your officer, include two “you might also be interested in” offers at the bottom, less visible but strong enough to keep them on the site.
Since you are paying for this traffic, is very important to keep the bounce rate on this landing page low. Also, considering that these are visitors who are already familiar with the property in some way or other, the landing page can be in full “sell mode” with this traffic.
Filing For Trademark Violation
The second way to combat the use of your brand name is by filing a trademark violation with Google. While there is nothing you can do to prevent your competitors from bidding on your name, a trademark complaint can prevent competitors from using your name in their ad text. Be aware though that your competitors can still use your name in the display URL (e.g. competitor.com/yourname). If you do not have a trademark on your name, then out-bidding your competition is your only option.
photo credit: koadmunkee
Tags: Pay per click, ppc, search marketing
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