Here is a question that keeps coming up: should you buy your brand traffic? What is the added value of a paid result, while my site appears in 1st position anyway via organic results on my own brand searches?  Here are 5 reasons to buy your own brand’s keywords:

Dominate your search result pages

Buying your own brand keywords obviously increases the prominence of your search results. This makes it possible to reduce the negative impact due to the presence of competitors or a third-party website (a negative opinion from a review website for instance).

Control your own message

Unlike organic search results, we have total control over the content of our ads! This allows, for example, to:

• Lead the Internet user to alternative pages (via sitelinks)
• Highlight a promotion over a short period of time, during Black Friday for example (via promotion extensions)
• Show your USP’s (via callout extensions)
• Show an overview of your product types or services (via structured snippets)
• Give an overview of your prices (via price extensions)
• Display the address of your store (via location extensions)
• Display your phone number (via call extensions)

It’s cheap

In general, the cost per click on your own brand is very low (only a few cents). This is mainly due to the fact that:

• Google Ads’ bidding system follows an inflationary model: the more competitors there are, the higher the bids (thus getting more expensive). However, there are usually few if any competitors willing to bid on your own brand’s keywords.
• The quality score is usually around 10/10: the click-through-rates and the relevance of your ads to your landing pages are naturally very high. A maximum quality score allows you to pay for clicks at the lowest price.

There are competitors bidding on it

Buying your own traffic will help to limit the leakage of traffic to your competitors.  Moreover, this will drastically increase the price they pay per click: you will have the advantage of having a quality score of 10/10 on your own brand, while your competitors will generally be well below (rarely above 5/10).  They will therefore pay significantly more than you (at least three times as much) for the same clicks, and it will very quickly become unprofitable for them.

Bringing added value

This is probably the most important reason. According to our many experiences: having a paid result in addition to the organic result generates a small percent of incremental traffic (between 1 and 5%), compared to not doing so.

The best way to check this is to measure the overall click-through-rate = (paid clicks + organic clicks) / impressions (using Google Ads and Google Search Console), with and without paid results (pause every other day, or every other week, over an extended period).

Result: the Paid + Organic combination increases the overall click rate by about 1% (if there are no competitors on your brand), and by about 5% (if there are competitors on your brand). These figures may still vary if the brand’s keyword is accompanied by generic terms.

In the end, the question remains: is it profitable? Does the 1 to 5% added value generated allows to cover the budget invested to buy my whole branded traffic? In our experience: it’s profitable 99% of the time!