Stop! You’re Wasting Your PPC Budget

I’m continually puzzled by why people do this, so I am going to say it out loud. Quit paying to run ads on your own brand name in your search engine marketing. If you are the top result for your brand name in organic searches, you are throwing away good money and wasting your PPC budget by running ads on your name. People will click your paid ad instead of your free search result and your money will float away without a net gain to you or your brand.

I have heard some of the arguments:

1. I have a great conversion rate on those ads.
2. My bounce rate there is lower than my average ads.
3. I want to make sure I own my name.

My point is that all of those things will still be true if you save that money and apply it to keywords that bring in NEW customers that might NOT find you otherwise. The people converting on an ad targeted on your company name, when you are at the top of the search results, is money wasted.

If you say, “I keep it because it’s my top performing ad group,” I say you need to open up to the possibility that even if it’s your best cost per conversion, that money is still wasted since that person would have found you organically for free. If you have any volume of search traffic, all of those lower conversion costs still add up to missed opportunities on increasing brand awareness elsewhere to users who may have gone to your competitors.

Here’s an example using Pyxl. Let’s say I want to get more visitors by buying keywords on Google. I could say I want to be top of the page when people search “Pyxl.” But, I’m already top of the page. Instead, I’d rather be top of the page for “digital marketing” or “the world’s best marketing partner.” These are places I can meet NEW people.

So, here are my rules for bidding on your own company name in pay per click marketing. You are allowed to do so if:

1. You are so far down the search results that no one can find you.
2. Your competitors are bidding on your name (but if this is the case, return the favor and bid on their name).
3. You have too large of a marketing budget and nothing else to spend it on. However, if this is the case, reach out to me — I am sure I can come up with something better than that.

Overall, give it a try. Just say “no” to company-name-oriented ad groups when you are already top of the charts in organic search results.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022