Brand Bidding: Should You Bid on Your Own Brand Name? What the Studies Show

Brand bidding is buying search ads on queries that contain a brand name. It comes in two forms. Bidding on your own brand puts your ad above your own organic link when someone searches for you by name. Bidding on a competitor’s brand puts your ad in front of people who searched for someone else, a practice often called conquesting.

A brand query is unlike almost any other. The person already knows the business and, most of the time, wants to reach its site. Your organic link is usually the first result, so the ad sits directly above a link that already leads where the searcher was going. That is why brand ads look so good in the ad account and why their value is so often questioned.

The terms on both sides matter. In search reports, branded vs non-branded queries are split for the same reason: demand for a name you built behaves differently from demand for a product anyone can sell. Brand bidding is a question about the first kind.

An ad on your own name buys a click. The question is whether it buys a visit, an order or a customer that you would not have had anyway. A click on the ad is often a click your organic link would have taken for free, one position lower on the same page.

The ad account cannot see this. It reports the conversions that followed a click on the ad, under its own attribution model, and the organic click that would have happened instead is invisible to it. So the revenue an ad platform attributes to brand terms is attributed revenue. It is not incremental revenue, which is what the ads added beyond what would have happened without them.

Attributed revenue answers “which link did the buyer click?” Incremental revenue answers “what would the business have lost without the ad?” Only the second tells you whether the bid pays, and only an experiment can measure it.

Four studies, each from a controlled test or a large set of them, frame the question. Two looked at brand keywords directly; two from Google looked at search ads in general and give the context.

The eBay study is the strongest case against brand bids. When eBay stopped its brand ads on Yahoo and MSN, almost all of the forgone click traffic came in through the organic link instead: after allowing for seasonal swings with Google as the control, only 0.529% of the click traffic was lost, and 99.5% was retained^[1]. The authors call brand-keyword ads an extreme case, with no measurable short-term benefit, and they note that no competitor was seen bidding on eBay’s name after it stopped^[1].

The Bing study tested far more brands and found that eBay is not the norm. With no competing ads, a brand ad lifted total clicks to the brand by 1%–4%, less for the largest brands, while shifting nearly half of the clicks on the organic link to the paid one^[2]. That makes each incremental click expensive. But for brands that faced rival ads and chose not to bid, competitors took 18%–42% of the clicks, and the authors found the return on defensive brand ads strongly positive^[2].

Google’s 2012 meta-analysis sits between the two. Where the advertiser’s site held the first organic result, 50% of ad clicks were incremental on average; where it had no organic result on the page, all of them were^[3]. The same study found that 66% of ad clicks occur on pages with no organic result for the advertiser, which is why brand queries, where you nearly always rank first, are the exception^[3].

Google’s 2011 study is the context, not the answer. Across more than 400 pause studies and every kind of keyword, 89% of paid clicks were not replaced by organic clicks when the ads stopped^[4]. That figure is dominated by queries where the advertiser does not rank, and it says little about your own name.

The studies do not disagree; they describe different situations. The answer turns on two things: whether competitors bid on your name, and how well known your brand is.

So the honest answer to “should I bid on my brand name?” is: it depends, and you can find out. A rule such as “we rank first, so cut the ad” is right for some brands and costly for others. The Bing study is clear that the same ad that wastes money for one brand defends traffic for another^[2].

In a PPC account, brand bidding usually lives in a campaign of its own, so that its cost, its clicks and its conversions are never mixed with those of non-brand campaigns. Two habits keep the picture honest.

• Keep brand terms out of non-brand campaigns with negative keywords, so a broad campaign does not quietly buy your own name at a higher price.
• Report brand and non-brand results apart. A blended return on ad spend lets cheap brand clicks hide expensive non-brand ones.
• Watch navigational brand queries, such as a login, returns or order-tracking search. A paid click there rarely adds anything your organic link would not.
• Record when a brand campaign is paused, changed or restarted, with its settings before and after, so a later change in orders can be read against it.

Google Ads shows who else enters your auctions. Its auction insights report gives, for Search campaigns, your impression share, the overlap rate with each other advertiser, how often they ranked above you and how often they appeared at the top of the page^[6]. On a brand campaign, that list is the competitor evidence the studies say decides the answer.

Competitors bidding on your brand is common and generally allowed in the United States; using the trademark in ad text is a different matter, as the Bing study notes^[2]. In that study, the rivals bidding on a brand were usually much smaller than the brand itself, using its awareness to reach its searchers^[2].

What a rival’s ad costs you depends on where it sits. When your own ad holds the top place, competitors below it took only a small share of your clicks, but each one added raised the share of your clicks that were paid rather than free^[2]. When you were absent, a rival in the top place took a large share^[2].

1. 1Search your brand name and its common variants in each market you sell in, on several days, and note every advertiser above your organic link.
2. 2Check the auction insights of your brand campaign for the same names and how often each one appears.
3. 3Split your brand terms by what you see: terms where rivals bid, and terms where nobody else does.
4. 4Treat the second group as test candidates and keep bidding on the first until a test says otherwise.

A holdout pauses brand ads for part of your audience and compares it with the rest. Google’s own geo experiments do this by choosing non-overlapping regions at random as test and control groups and serving ads by location^[5]. eBay used the same idea in a later test in Germany, pausing brand ads in a random half of the country’s states^[1].

1. 1Choose the terms: brand terms with no rival ads observed, from the step above.
2. 2Choose the design: a geo split where your ad account can target regions, or alternating on and off periods where it cannot.
3. 3Choose the metric before you start: total brand orders and revenue, paid and organic together, never paid clicks alone.
4. 4Run a power check: work out the smallest change your order volume can detect over the window, and lengthen the window or widen the test if it is too large.
5. 5Freeze the plan: the terms, the regions, the window and the thresholds, written down before the ads are paused.
6. 6Read the result as a range, test regions against what the control regions predict, and compare the incremental margin with what the ads cost.

The control regions are the counterfactual baseline: what the test regions would have done with the ads still on. Without them, a test becomes a pre-post analysis, and a sale or a holiday in the paused weeks reads as the effect of the pause. Seasonality is the reason eBay’s first estimate, a simple before-and-after comparison, overstated the loss until Google traffic was used as the control^[1].

A result can go either way, and both are useful. Brand ads whose incremental margin is more than they cost are kept, now with evidence. Brand ads that add less are a finding for the team that runs the account. In both cases the answer is read on your own orders, not assumed from a study of someone else’s.

In QueryRev, a brand-bid holdout is a typed decision with this plan frozen at approval, applied under your policy and kept in the Change Ledger, and its result is called incremental only once the read is verified, as set out under Paid Search.

• Measuring paid clicks or paid conversions alone: the test is about the organic clicks that replace them, so read paid and organic together.
• Pausing brand ads everywhere at once, with no control group, and reading the weeks after against the weeks before.
• Testing terms where rivals bid, then reading the clicks they took as a short-term blip.
• Stopping the test early because the first week looks good, or because it looks bad.
• Choosing the metric, the window or the threshold after the result is in.
• Treating the result as permanent: rivals can start bidding on your name next month, so read the overlap again on a schedule.

Each of these turns a test into an opinion with a chart attached. A test that names its plan in advance, reads total orders against a control and reports a range can be argued with, which is what makes it worth running.