Hi What are peoples opinions on bidding on your own brand with PPC? For example, if your company was called crazy widgets direct would you bid on the keyword crazy widgets direct (and variations of it)? I have a company that is currently bidding on its brand, and turns a profit from that brand campaign, but i wonder sometimes if i am wasting money as we are also number 1 AND number 2 in the organic results (with other references to us in the lower positions). My thinking is if the sponsored link is there to click on it will attract clicks, if its not they will just click on our organic result for free. The only thing that worries me in switching it off is if they click on our competitors sponsored links instead of ours and we lose the sales (we get a lot of sales from our brand campaign).
You've said it yourself, if they're searching for your brand name, and another ad is at the top, that ad will get a lot of the clicks you should get. As long as there are other ads appearing for your brand name and variations of it, you should always bid on it - bid on brand even when you're not bidding on anything else, or you are just giving your customers away to someone else.
There's good reasons to bid on a brand, even your own and even if it is not well known. I used to sell very niche software. Of course my page came up first in the SERPs and nobody else was selling it, nobody bidding on the name as a keyword. I still bid on the product name for the only reason to see how many people were becoming aware of the product, although they were not always looking for it as it turns out the term was being used for something else, in the same industry. But I could see how popular the product was becoming month to month through all promotion events. I think that's valuable information. That keyword by the way got very high click rates as well as conversion rates, both rates higher than any other keyword, so not a waste of money.