Brand Advertising - A Waste of Money?

In Google Ads, you can essentially use any keyword to promote your product or service. This means you can also use your own brand name as a keyword. Over the past 15 years, I have encountered various viewpoints regarding the use of brand names: some people swear by them, while others are categorically against them. Let us take a closer look at both sides.

Is advertising your own brand a "waste of money"?

I have quite often encountered the opinion that creating campaigns and advertising on your own brand keywords is pointless, and there have been cases where, as an advertising specialist, I have been forbidden from doing so by the client. Most often, this is justified by the argument that everyone searching for our brand already knows us and will come to us through organic Google results, so why spend money on it? It is a logical viewpoint, or at least it might seem so initially.

The brand is important

The main goal of any marketing activity is to develop brand awareness and strength, because in the long run, the brand will be the primary driver of your product or service sales. Any reasonably experienced advertising specialist will oppose the critics of brand usage and will want to include brand keywords in their campaigns, as these types of campaigns serve two main purposes.

Brand protection

Remember: an ad will always appear above organic Google results. As business owners, you can certainly decide not to use your brand in advertising campaigns because you already appear in the first position in organic results and people will find you. It is possible that this will happen, but...

It must be remembered that there are other people using the Google Ads system, and they can, of course, be your closest competitors. Nothing really stops them from using your brand as their own keyword in advertising campaigns. Thus, we quickly arrive at a situation where a competitor's ad appears above your organic results.

Yes, one could argue that the consumer will see that the first result is an ad and not the brand they were looking for, but from experience, I can say that you will definitely lose 25-30% of consumers who were technically looking for you and initially wanted to land directly on your website. To protect against such situations, it is recommended to use brand campaigns to shield your brand from competitors, as your brand ad will appear in the first position in 99.9% of cases, even if competitors are bidding on your brand. Additionally, it should be noted that the average cost-per-click on your own brand keywords is usually very low, requiring minimal investment to successfully protect your brand.

A brand development indicator

The second task of brand campaigns is to serve as an indicator of brand development. As I mentioned before, the goal of any marketing activity is to grow brand strength and awareness. The hardest part is measuring this. This is where brand campaigns can help, serving as an indicator of how our brand is developing. By looking at brand search impressions, we can track whether the number of searches is increasing over time. The more people search for our brand, the greater its awareness. Such data can help us understand the dynamics of brand development, which in turn gives us insight into the success of our marketing activities.

The Verdict

In my professional view, there are far more pros than cons to using brand campaigns, and I always create brand campaigns for all my clients and will continue to do so in the future. A brand campaign protects the brand, it is relatively cheap, and it can ensure that we get two links on the first page of Google results that lead to our website: one in the ad and one in the organic results. Mathematically, we double the chance that the consumer will come directly to us. Try brand campaigns. Create one, test its performance and effectiveness for at least 2 months, and then, after evaluating the results, decide whether or not to continue with this strategy.