At Contitude, when we help our clients with Google Ads, we are often asked: should we advertise on our own company name even if our own company is at the top of the organic searches? In this blog post, we'll go through how we at Contitude think about this question.
Advertise with Google Ads
Google Ads is Google's advertising platform for buying ads. It is possible through Google Ads to buy ads in a display network on, for example, Youtube and Google. When you buy search ads through Google Ads, you can decide which searches your ad will be displayed for. This can be done very specifically through exact matches, i.e. you will only appear on for example "Contitude" but not "Contitude market partners". Or more broadly as you can set a broad match such as "market partners". Then you can appear on everything that Google thinks is a similar search. With a broad match you will for example appear on synonyms and related searches.
When you advertise on Google, you usually pay per click for your ad. There is an automatic bidding process at any given time that determines which ads will appear for a particular keyword.
The bidding process on Google Ads
How much you pay for a click on Google depends on a couple of factors. The bidding process works in such a way that everyone who wants to appear on a specific keyword bids against each other with a weighted bid calculated by the formula: your stated bid per click in dollars x quality score = weighted bid.
The quality score is measured on a scale of 1-10, where 10 is the best and 1 is the worst. This means that your weighted bid can be 10 times higher than a competitor if you have a higher quality score and the competitor has a lower quality score. What is included in the quality score is Expected Clickthrough Rate, Ad Relevance and Visitor Experience on the landing page.
Expected click-through rate is Google's estimate of the percentage of people who will click on your ad when it appears in the search results. It is difficult to influence yourself and you can only try to make your ad as attractive as possible. For example, an offer in the ad will be more click-friendly than an ad without an offer.
The relevance of an ad is about how well it answers the question asked in the Google search itself. According to Google, the most relevant ad is the ad that has the search term in its ad. So if you want to appear for the keyword "What is Google Ads", your ad should be structured with the title "What is Google Ads" and then name this in the ad text. Relevance is also measured against all the topics you write about on your domain as well as your domain name.
Thelanding page experience is about the design of the page you send traffic to through the ad. First and foremost, it should be about what you've written about in the ad and match the search term you've shown the ad to. The landing page also needs to be easy to navigate and quick to load. In addition, it is important that it is responsive, i.e. that it works just as well on a computer as it does for a mobile user.
These three factors are then added together to create a total quality score on Google.
Advertise on your own company name
When it comes to advertising on your own company name, you're already off to a good start in terms of quality score as no one else has higher relevance than you. This means that you will pay less than anyone else who would want to advertise on your business name. The exception is when your website would be much worse than your competitors' websites in terms of user-friendliness.
Since you will have a higher quality score than your competitors may have on your company name, you will be able to push up the price per click that your competitors have to pay.
Chances are you already have your own business at the top of the Google search results when someone searches for your business name. If this is the case, we at Contitude don't usually recommend advertising your own company name unless someone else is doing so.
However, if you have a competitor advertising under your company name, we strongly recommend that you start advertising under your own company name immediately. This is partly because competitors will pay more per click and hopefully find it too expensive per click to advertise on that search term. But also because you want to avoid a potential customer going to a competitor's website before they get to yours.
Summary
As the bidding process and cost per click is influenced by a quality score, we always recommend clients to advertise on their own company name when you are not organically at the top or when a competitor is advertising on your company name.
In the case where you rank first organically and have no one else advertising your company name, we usually recommend not advertising your own company name. But then you need to pay attention to changes.
Want help and advice with Google Ads?
Book a free meeting with us at Contitude via the link below.
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