Brand Bidding PPC
To Pause or Not To Pause
Indium Web Management
info@indiumwm.com
01865 339470

Reasons To Stop
Brand Bidding
• The Thought Process
People searching for your brand through brand terms are motivated to
find your company no matter what
2. Cash Saving
Instant cash saving on expenditure that needn’t be spent
3. Organic Placement
If you are top of the natural search listings for your brand term why pay
for PPC?

Reasons To Bid On Brand Terms
• Control Marketing Message
If you don’t enter the auction your resellers and affiliates control your
brand image.
Natural results lack dynamics, you can’t chop and change your meta tags
to align with promotions whereas PPC text can easily change to any
promotion you like.
• Testing
With PPC you can test different messages, promotions, demographics,
geographic regions, calls to action and landing pages. From this you can
learn what your buyers react best to.
• Multi Channel Marketing
PPC ads compliment cross channel marketing through reaffirming brand
image and messages.

• Competition
Not bidding can siphon off leads and sales to your competition. Affiliates
could brand bid on your brand when you aren’t in the office to check. You
never know when competition may start bidding
• Real Estate
PPC is a cheap way of gaining SERP real estate reaffirming brand
confidence . Eg a natural and a paid entry gives you 20% of the screen
• Drives Conversions
It is not uncommon to see over a 6000% return on brand bidding, an
effective way to guarantee income each month
• Future Problems
If you leave the auction your rivals will start to receive a better quality
score, when you re enter the auction, your CPC may well be larger as well
as having to improve your quality score

Our Experience
What we did
• We test the impact of brand ppc pausing regularly for our clients, the
following relates to tests run across several websites during 2009.
• We gathered results for 4 weeks with PPC turned on, then paused the
brand bidding for 4 weeks
• We looked at data at a keyword level. We compared the sales, visitors and
total cost of PPC spend and also natural results for the 4 weeks we ran
PPC against the same keywords for the weeks we paused brand bidding
using non-paid keywords in Google analytics.
• We also looked at the whole site statistics as a benchmark so that we
could see whether the results we had gathered were in line with the way
that the whole site performed

The Results
• For 5 out of the 6 brands, both sales & visitors dropped significantly
• The average drop in sales for the brand keywords we tested was 34%, the
average loss in visitors was 23%
• The PPC cost was very small compared to the additional revenue that we
received with PPC turned on
The Next Step
• We then turned back on keywords that didn’t perform well once PPC was
turned off. For most brands this was about 90% of keywords
• Increased focus on SEO activity to improve natural performance for the
next test

In Conclusion
• You don't want to waste money for no reason
• BUT... It’s difficult to measure the what drives the buy
• Our experience shows that you can lose sales & visitors through not brand
bidding
• Test, test, test