Bid on Your Brand in Google Ads

When it comes to advertising your business on the Google Ads platform, it’s common to first focus on generic keywords. 

For example, if you sell graphic t-shirts like my other brand Threadheads, you might focus on keywords like ‘cool t shirts’ and ‘funny t shirts’.

But there’s a nice little secret sauce that every ecommerce brand should be leveraging (yes, it’s possible to leverage sauce). 

And that is... *drum roll*

Your brand name.

Bidding on branded search queries is the practice of placing pay per click (PPC) bids on the name of your own product or brand name. 

This is a great marketing tactic for a number of reasons:

1. You get control over the landing pages and marketing copy users see when they Google your brand name. For example, brand ads enable Adidas to achieve full control over its marketing copy and links to specific high-value landing pages.

2. You get way more real estate on the search engine results page when someone searches your brand name. You'll get not only the paid search result but also the organic listing too! That's a ton of click-through potential. For example, here’s how my brand looks when you Google it:

3. Your brand name might include key terms that mean other things. For example, Apple might want to ensure Google isn’t serving content related to the fresh fruit when users try to search for its products.

4. It stops competitors bidding on your brand name. As ecommerce entrepreneurs, we operate in a highly competitive online space. Make sure your competitors don’t outrank you for your own name, so you can build an airtight marketing funnel. In the below example, Monday is defending their turf against rival productivity app Asana.

How do I create a Brand Campaign?

A basic campaign structure could look like this: 

If you’re a small business or just starting out, you’ll only need one Ad Group that includes your brand name. For example, ours would be HeapsGood and include all exact match keywords related to our brand such as [heapsgood], [heaps good], [heapsgood packaging] and so forth.

And that’s it. Remember that the CPCs (cost per click) for your brand keywords will likely be very cheap, as competition for those keywords in the bidding auction will be low. So I would highly recommend testing out this tactic. There are few marketing opportunities that are as easy to implement as this one!