Bidding on Your Own Business Name

The obvious objection

Somebody searching for your business name has already decided to find you.

Your own site is almost certainly the top organic result, and your listing probably appears too.

Paying for a click from that person is buying something you were about to receive free.

Which is a fair objection and it is not the whole picture, because the results page contains other things.

What else is on that page

• Competitors bidding on your name, which is permitted.
• Directories and aggregators, which rank well for business names.
• Review platforms, which may show a mixed picture.
• Similarly named businesses, in the same area or another.
• Your own listing, if it is claimed and complete.

The first is the reason the question exists. If a competitor is advertising on searches for your name, the top of that page belongs to them until you occupy it.

Checking whether anybody is

The first thing to establish, and it takes two minutes.

Search your own business name, from a phone, in a private window, and look at what appears above the organic results.

Repeat it a few times over a fortnight, since advertising rotates and a single check can miss somebody.

If nothing appears, the defensive argument does not apply to you today and may next year.

If a competitor appears, you have a decision to make and a rough idea of the cost, since brand terms are usually inexpensive for the business that owns the name.

A worked example

A business that discovered a competitor advertising on its name after a customer mentioned clicking the wrong result.

They started a small brand campaign, which cost very little because the ad was highly relevant to the search and few others were competing.

It occupied the top position and pushed the competitor down.

What they also found, unexpectedly, was that a proportion of people searching their name were looking for the phone number rather than the site, and an ad with the number in it served that directly.

The spend was modest and the outcome was that searches for their name reliably produced them at the top of the page.

They reviewed it annually and would stop if the competitor did.

The arguments for

Four situations where it is defensible.

A competitor is bidding on your name, and the top of the page would otherwise be theirs.

Your organic result is not dominant, because the business is new, the name is generic, or a directory outranks you.

You need to control the message, such as during a promotion or after a problem, where the ad can say something the organic result cannot.

And the cost is genuinely trivial, since brand terms are cheap for the name's owner and the total spend may be a few dollars a month.

Misspellings and variations

A practical detail that changes the calculation slightly.

People misspell business names constantly, and a misspelled search may not return you first organically.

Which is a genuine gap that a brand campaign fills, since the ad can match variations the organic result does not.

Worth checking: search a few plausible misspellings of your own name and see whether you still appear.

If a common variation returns competitors or nothing useful, that is a stronger argument for a brand campaign than the defensive one.

The arguments against

Equally real, and they apply to most businesses most of the time.

You are paying for clicks you would have received, and the proportion is high when your organic result is already first.

The budget could buy clicks from people who have not heard of you, which is what advertising is usually for.

And measuring it honestly is difficult, because a brand campaign always looks excellent: high click rate, low cost, good conversion, all because the people clicking had already chosen you.

That last point matters. A brand campaign will always appear to be the best performing thing in the account, and it is the one contributing least.

The counter-case

Where it is clearly wasteful.

A business with a distinctive name, a dominant first result, a complete listing, and nobody bidding against it. There is nothing to defend and nothing to gain.

A very small budget that would be better concentrated on searches for the service rather than the name.

And any situation where the brand spend is being counted towards the campaign's success, which flatters the account and misleads the decision.

Reporting brand and non-brand separately is essential if both are running, because combining them hides how the money that matters is performing.

What the ad should say

Different from an ordinary service ad, since the reader already knows who you are.

They do not need persuading that you exist. They need the thing they came for, which is usually the number, the address or the opening hours.

Which means a brand ad works best carrying the practical details rather than a sales message.

Adding the phone number, and links to the pages people most often want, turns the ad into a shortcut rather than an advertisement.

That also improves the case for running it at all, since it is then doing something the organic result does less directly.

Bidding on a competitor's name

The reverse question, which comes up immediately.

It is generally permitted to bid on a competitor's name as a keyword, and using their trademark in the ad text is a different matter with its own rules.

Practically, it tends to be expensive, converts poorly, and can invite the same in return, which turns into two businesses paying for traffic they both used to get free.

Some sectors do it routinely and most local trades do not.

Anything involving a trademark in ad text is worth proper advice rather than a general article, since the rules differ by platform and by jurisdiction.

Deciding

1. Search your own name, several times over a fortnight.
2. Note whether anybody is advertising.
3. Check whether your result dominates.
4. If both are fine, do not bother.
5. If not, run a small brand campaign.
6. Report it separately from everything else.

The sixth is what keeps the rest of the account honest, since a brand campaign averaged in with everything else makes a mediocre account look successful.

How to judge the rest of the spend is covered in a budget too small to learn anything.

Frequently asked questions

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