Hi, I am new to Google Adwords, I was looking Google Analytics of my friends website and found that his own website name is on the top of paid keywords, I was confused and when I asked her about this, she said: "Virtually ALL companies advertise on their own keywords to combat all the other people advertising on their own keyword. Pretty much industry standard in my research. " Any Expert Opinion? Thanks
It can be quite lucrative to bid on keywords for your competition, depending on your vertical, and it directly harms the competitor you're bidding on. Given that, it makes sense that people would want to protect those keywords even with just a token bid to discourage competitors. If there is a lot of competition, you may even find that ranking #1 on the organic results will end up being fourth on the SERP due to there being three promoted ads at the top, and that can lose you traffic. On the other hand, especially if the traffic for that keyword is not particularly qualified, you may find that paid results don't really affect traffic much at all. It all depends on the situation. Therefore it seems reasonable that you'd want to augment your organic ranking for your own brand with paid if you think the paid results will help above and beyond the organic. Like any other keyword you have to ensure that it's profitable, though you also need to remember that all the traffic through the paid result is marginal beyond the organic result and therefore you need to make sure you're looking at cost per marginal click (this applies to any keyword you are ranking #1 for organically).
You're talking about bidding on your website name such as "mycompany.com", right? People who search that way obviously don't know how the Internet, browsers and search engines work. I've seen this many times. Their browser is set to open Google or some other search engine. They think they have to search the web site's name in order to find it, not realizing they can type it in the browser's address bar. I've seen people do this for years every time they go online, even for familiar sites. Of course, doing so almost always shows the actual site first in the organic rankings. They click on it and go merrily on their way. These people won't notice the ads. So advertising to them is a waste in the sense that they won't see your ad. Even if they do and click, they are wasted clicks. Think about it. They were looking for that site whose name you bid on, they're "sold" so yours is not on their radar and converting them is extremely difficult once they're sold on some other brand. Now, there is some value to bid on your or other site names. You gather data. This applies to actual brands too (Ford Focus vs Toyota Camry for example). It tells you how popular you are compared to them. It can be an indication if you are gaining or losing market share just by the impression numbers and act on this information. The value is not to take away traffic from competitors by bidding on their site name. Only a very small percentage of people search this way and click rates are almost non-existent so the purpose is not to get clicks. Even bidding on brands is of little traffic value: if they click, they don't convert in the vast majority of cases as they are pre-sold on that brand. Bidding on your own site name, the click rate is usually very high (not surprisingly) as is bidding on your own brand. I bid on my own product's brand name before and the conversion rate was extremely high, again not surprising. They had heard of the product's name either from having visited my site previously or it was mentioned on some other site. They did a search on it instead of using a generic term. As they were somewhat pre-sold, the conversion rate on the brand was many folds higher than the generic terms or other similar products.
My experience with this working with major brands is clearly very different. In my experience, these people are more likely to click ads which appear above the SERPs because they don't know the difference between ads and organic results. Bidding on these sorts of terms has always provided fantastic CTRs and decent conversion rates for me.
I believe that to be the case as well. Click rates on ads when bidding on competing brand names can be high but I find that's not generally the case. It's worse if the brand is a trademarked term. And generally, conversions are poorer often resulting in negative ROI. They were after all looking for that other brand, not yours, they usually are deeper into the buying cycle. There are always exceptions of course.