Yup you read that right, let's debate one of the most common conversations within the pay-per-click world. We'll provide the case for why it is very important to bid on your brand name and the rare case for when bidding your name may be premature.

Let's face it. No one likes paying for their own name.

Seriously Though, You Need To Bid On Your Name

Bidding on your brand name has a few keep benefits when it comes to leveraging paid search.

1. Control The Traffic

One key advantage leveraging paid search for your brand traffic is that it allows for full control of where to send that traffic. Having the ability to analyze exactly what level on intent your brand level search is driving to your website.

In many cases, this traffic may turn out to be returning customers who have already heard of or have seen an awareness ad previously. If you want to take this a step further, try A/B testing the traffic to multiple landing experiences.

This ensures you have a solid read on both your conversion rates and iterating on your performance marketing approach.

2. Higher Click Through Rates

Through testing running brand ads with your organic placement increases the overall real estate you have within Google's search result page. The combination of both your paid and organic ad increases the overall blended CTR for both urls.

3. Play Defense With Your Competition

Unfortunately, some industries do not have rules and guidelines around bidding on your competitors in order to "conquest" brand traffic. This is an extremely common practice for businesses.

Here is a great example of a few competitors bidding on bankrate.com.

So now that we covered the benefits we'll touch upon where you may not initially bid on your brand name.

The Case For Not Bidding on Your Name

To be honest, there really isn't a huge case for not bidding on your name. The exception however is when your business is early in it's growth stage and has lower brand recognition.

If you are bidding in Google Ads you could actual check to see who is bidding on your name by analyzing your auction insights.

Leveraging auction insights will also allow you to create your own strategy to bid back on competitors who are bidding on your name.

Closing

Depending on where you currently stand with your media budget and brand development it may or may not be advantageous to bid on your own name. All businesses who are looking to scale will eventually run into competition within Google Ads.