Paid Search
Why Brand Bidding is Still Necessary
Paying for clicks on your own name feels wasteful. When it protects sales competitors would take, when it is wasted, and how to test which applies to you.
BenchMarketing editorial team Updated October 2, 2026 3 min readShare
If someone searches your company's name, they are probably looking for you. Why pay for the click when your website sits at the top of the organic results? Sometimes you should not. Often you should, because you are not the only one bidding.
The case for brand bidding
- Competitors can bid on your name. In most countries, Google allows advertisers to bid on other companies' brand terms as keywords. If you are absent, their ad sits above your organic listing.
- Ads take up the top of the page. On mobile especially, ads and other features can push your organic result below the first screen.
- Brand clicks are cheap. Brand terms usually have high relevance and low cost per click, so protecting them costs little.
- You control the message. An ad can point to a current offer, a specific page or a sitelink to support, which an organic listing cannot.
The case against
If nobody else bids on your name and your organic listing dominates the page, most people who would click your ad would click your organic result instead. Brand ads then mainly move clicks from free to paid. Brand campaigns also report excellent ROAS precisely because these people were already coming, which can make the whole account look better than it is.
Test it rather than argue about it
Pause brand ads in a few comparable regions (or for a few weeks) and compare total brand traffic and conversions, paid plus organic, with regions where they keep running. If total brand conversions barely change, most brand ad clicks were taken from organic. If they drop, the ads were protecting sales.
Check the auction insights report before and during the test to see which competitors appear on your brand terms.
Trademarks in ad text
Bidding on a brand keyword and using the brand name in ad text are treated differently. Trademark owners can file a complaint with Google to restrict others using their trademark in ad text, though competitors can still bid on the keyword in most regions.
Keep brand separate
Run brand in its own campaign with its own budget, and exclude brand terms from Performance Max with brand exclusions. Otherwise brand's cheap conversions blend into non-brand results and hide how prospecting is really performing. See our view on Performance Max.
About the figures
Benchmark figures in this article come from the BenchMarketing dataset and update when the benchmark pages do. Each benchmark page lists its sources and period; see our methodology.
Sources
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