Whatever your title in search engine marketing is, you likely have an opinion on brand term bidding for pay-per-click (PPC) keywords. There has been much discussion—and much written—on this topic recently. (Actually, there are 386,000 Google results for "should I bid on brand keywords in AdWords" at the time of this writing.)

For those unfamiliar with PPC, the reason for the discussion and *gasp* debate is fairly simple:

1. Those without an investment in paid search tend to hesitate spending money on traffic that could have come for "free".
2. Those with an investment in paid search tend to prefer the inclusion of high-converting brand terms with high quality scores in their PPC accounts (and PPC reports).

There is a time to bid on brand keywords

No, I’m not a whistle-blower on paid search. I'm not here to reveal a conspiracy that all search engine marketers (SEMs) have signed in blood to deceive the masses about the benefits of brand bidding for the sake of the industry.

(Source of images)

In fact, I generally believe the pro-brand bidding arguments raised by my fellow PPCers are compelling and insightful. If you are unfamiliar with these main arguments, check out these articles:

• Brand Terms in Bing Ads: To Bid or Not to Bid? by Bing Ads
• 5 Reasons to Start Bidding on Branded Terms (If You Aren’t Already) by Kayla Kurtz of PPC Hero
• Five Reasons to Bid on Branded Terms in PPC by Erin Sagan of Wordstream
• Incremental Clicks Aspect of Search Advertising (PDF) by Google

Now, if you read those articles and still believe you should always avoid bidding on brand terms, I have one question for you:

If you don’t specifically bid on brand keywords, do you then purposefully exclude all forms of brand keywords from all of your PPC campaigns?

If your answer is no, then I’m confused. If you don’t exclude all of your brand keywords from all your campaigns, then your ads will show for brand terms whether you want them to or not.

Let’s say you (Polly) sells purple packs of pickled pumpernickel. You purposefully avoid bidding on any brand keywords, but you are bidding on modified broad match +pickled +pumpernickel, and maybe even phrase match "pickled pumpernickel". (If PPC match types are new to you, read this Google Help article: Using Keyword Matching Options.)

Here's the problem. If someone types in "polly's packs of pickled pumpernickel", which includes your brand name (on which you are NOT bidding), then your ads will still appear… on a branded keyword.

Oops.

If your answer is yes, however, I will first applaud you. Congratulations, you have followed your argument to its logical conclusion.

But after I heartily slap you on your back, I will caution you to rethink your strategy. You decide that you “ain’t stupid 'nough to waste hard-earned cash” on brand terms, so you add them all as negatives into all of your campaigns.

Unfortunately, there are three glaring weaknesses with this strategy:

1. If you added them in as [exact] match negatives alone, any brand term that a customer queries into the Googs will now be shuffled into your non-brand ad groups, and you will pay a far higher cost-per-click (CPC) for that non-branded query than you would have had you just bid on brand in the first place. 
2. If you added them in as broad or phrase match negatives, you will actually be excluding your brand from any brand auction, and you wouldn’t even know you missed it since it won't appear in your search query report. All those competitors bidding on "pickled pumpernickel" will have a heyday with those top three SERP slots on your branded query.  

Oops.

Weakness No. 2 above actually gets worse with e-commerce sites, thanks to the growing power of Google Shopping in the SERPs. If you completely pull your brand from your account, then you are allowing far more advertisers to show in a highly clickable format above your organic results. In the example below, had Home Depot excluded its brand from Google Shopping, there would have been five highly visual competitors' ads appearing above their first organic result. 

(Side note: Regarding Google Shopping brand traffic, Martin Roettgerding details a brilliant strategy by which you can separate brand queries from non-brand queries in Google Shopping campaigns. It's worth a read if you manage e-commerce PPC: Taking Google Shopping to the Next Level.)

There is a time to NOT bid on brand keywords (NBBK)

Charts, graphs, and arguments are great. In fact, as I noted above, there are many convincing charts, graphs, and arguments for why a PPCer should bid on brand terms.

But unsurprisingly, I’ve found SMB owners and general managers to be less-than-impressed with averages, should-be's and theories when it comes to paying for terms they could have gotten for free.

After all, when it comes right down to it, we are providing a service for real people with real businesses who feel the pain of every dollar in their marketing budget. This kind of emotional proximity can make things a little more difficult than simply showing a graph about incremental value. 

Maybe I’m the only one who has ever received pushback from an SMB client when I pitch brand bidding, but I feel that I’ve only ever seen PPC articles that talk about brand bidding solely in a positive light. So my question for us PPCers now is this: Is it ALWAYS best to bid on brand keywords? 

For instance, look at this example of a local brand here in Billings. (Shockingly, we do have coffee shops in Montana). Would you bid on this [brand] term?

After multiple conversations with concerned SMB clients, I have come to the opinion that it is not always best to bid on all brand keywords.

To elaborate, I do not make a practice of bidding on brand keywords that match all of the following criteria:

1. The [brand keyword] is exact match - If a keyword is a modified broad match or phrase, there is always a chance that someone will type in your brand with some random long-tail phrase you never considered but that a competitor is bidding on. In that case, you want to appear in that SERP so they don't win the day. Because of this regularly occurring scenario, I consider not bidding on exact match terms. 
2. The [brand keyword] has no competition – On one hand, even if your brand dominates organic, those three top competitor ads are tough to argue with, especially with mobile. Have you seen your mobile results lately for your brand? You might be horrified to see how much of that first tiny little page is taken up by “their” ads. On the other hand, if there is no ad competition then the competition argument for bidding on that term loses ground fast. Don't forget that in Adwords, a competitor could be excluding your location, have a capped budget during the time you are searching or be ineligible to show for your query for some other reason at the time and place you are searching. Because of this, it can be helpful (if you have the budget) to use third-party software that monitors competition bidding on your brand terms.
3. The [brand keyword] first page of organic results is dominated by the client’s brand – Admittedly, a client's brand is likely going to be strong enough to dominate organic real estate on the first page of the SERPs, but some local businesses don’t control it all. This situation requires you to make a judgment call. 

Please note that I said ALL of these criteria must be met. I bid on brand terms unless all three of these criteria are met. 

My NBBK strategy

It would be remiss of me to leave you without giving you direction on how to implement my NBBK strategy in your SMB PPC accounts. Here is how I (generally) set up brand campaigns for my SMB clients:

Note 1 - The (E) stands for exact match, (BM) stands for modified broad match, and (P) stands for phrase match.

Note 2 – While some have completely eliminated phrase match from their strategy, I still use phrase in its own ad group for brands with two words in their core brand name. This is especially important if the two-word brand name can mean something completely different if those words are not used together.

Note 3 – Add all exact match terms in as mirrored negatives into the other non-exact ad groups. This is an essential part of the strategy, since it will prevent negatives that you do not want to bid on from being shown with other match types.

Note 4 – Pause all ad groups or keywords that meet the three previous NBBK requirements. In this example, I paused the brand (E) and buy brand (E) ad groups. Now, if someone types in your brand exactly, your ads will not appear; but if they type in your brand any other way, your ads will appear for all the other match types.

Final thoughts

With my strategy for (not) bidding on all brand keywords, you really can have your cake and eat it, too. This will allow you to engender trust from your client, while allowing to bid on those treasured brand keywords so that you can smile happily at your higher quality scores and increased conversions.

What about big brands?

I think it’s helpful to point out here that there is admittedly a big difference between an SMB brand and a national  brand. Many larger brands have multiple competitors bidding on their [brand] keywords, so this strategy is moot in those instances. However, I still think brand bidding is a good idea in those instances to avoid losing your loyal customers to a competitor’s ad.

Where do I start?

You might realistically inquire, "What am I supposed to do, start guessing at which brand terms I shouldn't be bidding on? This seems like a lot of work." On the contrary, I've found identifying [brand] terms for filtering to be a fairly simple practice that adds minimal extra time to creating my brand campaigns.

Now, here is how I suggest you go about finding what not to target:

1. Manually research the [brand] core terms. These will be the most likely terms for you to filter out.
2. Identify the top traffic brand terms in the client's Google Analytics > Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries report, and manually research those to consider excluding as [brand] if they meet all three criteria detailed above.
3. Don't stress out about it. If you do your due diligence on those first two steps, then you will probably pick up the majority of terms you need to filter. When you run across them in the future, while mining your brand campaign search query report, you can always add more.

Why should you do this?

Why go through the hassle? Why not just bid on these, collect the bump to the account's quality score, and move on with life?

Because you are advertising for a real SMB company, run by real people who care about real money. This point cannot be undervalued.

• If you are an agency, your client will be shocked that you are willing to lose conversions from the PPC pile (even though that's hardly a reality anymore now that we better understand attribution, right?) for the betterment of the company as a whole. 
• If you are in-house, your boss will be delighted that you are thinking of creative ways to maximize budget and conversions, therefore demonstrating that you also care about the company into which he has poured his life.

This speaks volumes to SMB managers and owners. They have tight budgets and tighter fists. So if you present a strategy to help their brand be found without mindlessly bidding on every brand term that comes along, they will love you for it.

What about you? What would you add to this strategy? Do you have any concerns about it? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.