Bidding on Brand Keywords in Google Ads

In digital marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO, also known as organic) and paid ads (such as Google Ads) are frequently managed as separate marketing channels. Your SEO improvements aim for long-term visibility, website exposure and higher rankings in search results, while PPC campaigns are used to direct high-intent traffic directly to your website.

While SEO and Paid Ads are two digital marketing strategies that work well alongside each other, you should also consider how they can influence each other.

One of the most common practices we see when looking at paid ads is keyword cannibalisation. This is when you end up bidding for Google Ads clicks on keywords where your website already holds a high organic position. In other words, you might have gotten the click for free!

While bidding on brand terms or top organic keywords isn’t inherently wrong (there are benefits), doing so without a structured approach can result in paying a high cost-per-click (CPC) for website visits that you would have received without a cost otherwise.

Benefits of Bidding on Your Brand Keywords

Before you pause all of your brand term keywords, it is important to understand that there are a range of benefits to doing so. Here are some of the reasons why bidding on brand terms can be useful:

• High Competition for Bids: If you have competitors are actively bidding on your brand name or main keyword terms relating to your business and services, their ads can appear above your #1 organic search result. In this case, running Google Ads protects your market share. Your own brand Ads will have higher relevance because your website also reflects your brand keywords.
• Increasing Brand Presence Online: Rather than relying solely on organic traffic, having your brand occupying both the top ad slot and the top organic position can maximise your SERP (Search Engine Result Page) presence. This can both suppress your competitor’s visibility, and highlight your online business as one with high levels of authority.
• Testing Your Ad Messaging: Compared to organic traffic, Google Ads offers quick and measurable feedback. Bidding on high-converting organic keywords allows you to test headline variations, new descriptions, special promotions, and calls to action (CTAs) before updating meta titles or landing pages.
• Working With Organic: Sometimes the work required to optimise a website organically can be daunting, or need a lot of time and effort. This is especially true if you have thousands of product pages needing updated, or if Google rolls out an algorithm update that impacts your organic search performance. Bidding on brand terms with paid ads can help make sure your website stays visible above search results, even if your organic search performance is lacking.

Drawbacks of Brand Keyword Term Bidding

While there are some substantial benefits to bidding on the brand name of your business, there are also things to consider before jumping right into bidding on brand terms, that could have a negative impact on your website’s organic performance.

• No Competitors Bidding on your Brand: If there are no competitors bidding on your brand name, you may think that it’s an easy win to grab the top ad spot. This is true, though if you hold the top organic search result already, paying for brand ad clicks might not be fully worthwhile, as you could be turning your free organic clicks into paid ones.
• Lower Relevance of Landing Pages: Most general brand campaigns will point directly to your homepage. If a user searches for your brand alongside a specific product or service, such as “[Brand Name] running shoes” or “Aillum SEO Audit” (in our own case) a brand ad might capture the click and drop them on the homepage instead of the specific category or product page. While an organic search result would naturally deliver them straight to the exact item they searched for, a generic paid ad forces them to start their search again from your main menu. This additional effort can lead to higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates. To prevent this, we recommend to either split brand campaigns by product/service categories to ensure people reach the correct dedicated landing page, or support brand ads with tailored sitelink extensions and other useful assets within Google Ads.
• Paying for Existing Customers: Not every brand search is a direct acquisition opportunity for conversions. A sizable portion of brand traffic can come from existing customers using Google as a navigational shortcut to find customer support, check order statuses, or access account logins.

Carefully consider both the benefits and drawbacks of brand keyword bidding when setting up your Google Ads campaigns. More often than not, individual circumstances (budgets, targeting, brand name definition, competitors, etc.) are unique to your online business, so there’s no one size fits all recommendation – brand campaigns will work fantastically for some businesses and poorly for others.

Bidding on brand terms without appropriate negative keyword lists (for example, terms such as “login”, “portal”, “support”, or “contact”) means paying Google for clicks from users who were already converted and just needed to log in, rather than customers who may be interested in making a purchase or enquiry.

What to Watch Out For: Automated Campaigns & Bidding

Aside from brand search campaigns, there is a risk of brand keyword cannibalisation that often comes from automated Google Ads campaign types. Most notably Performance Max and broad match search campaigns powered by Smart Bidding or “enhanced” by AI Max.

Automated campaigns are designed to aim for conversion or ROAS targets by finding the path of least resistance. Because brand queries naturally have the highest conversion rates and lowest costs, these automated algorithms will tend to lean towards bidding on your own brand name unless explicitly instructed not to. This creates a couple of significant problems for Google Ads.

• Artificially Inflated Campaign Metrics: When Performance Max uses searches for your brand to show ads, it can take full credit for high-intent conversions that likely already belonged to organic search or dedicated brand campaigns. This creates misleading reporting. Your Performance Max campaign may show a huge 800% ROAS, but hides the fact that it didn’t actually acquire any new prospective customers from non-brand search queries, the Display Network, or YouTube.
• Uncontrolled Bidding Overlap: If you run both a dedicated Brand Search campaign and a Performance Max campaign without restrictions, both can target the same brand keyword searches. This splits conversion attribution (which often favours Performance Max) and can inflate cost-per-click.

How to Control Automated Bidding in Google Ads

There are a few methods to better manage and rein in automated bidding and smart campaigns. We’d recommend at the bare minimum to consider the following options.

• Apply Account-Level Brand Exclusions: Google Ads allows you to build a Brand List and apply it as a brand exclusion directly to your Performance Max campaigns. This forces Performance Max to focus on non-brand queries.
• Audit Search Terms in Broad Match: If using broad match keywords in non-brand search campaigns, have a look through your Search Terms report regularly. Google’s keyword matching often links more generic terms to your brand name, pulling brand search terms into campaigns where you intended to capture new traffic.
• Isolate Brand Spend: If you choose to protect your brand name via paid ads, keep it separate in a dedicated, exact match Search campaign. This gives you direct control over your budget, prevents budgets from being wasted, and provides more accurate acquisition costs for searches relating to your products and services.

While these can help, we would also recommend to always stay vigilant. Google Ads always receives updates (both announced and unannounced changes) and these can impact even the most effective campaigns in unforeseen ways.

Conclusion

Search engine marketing shouldn’t be a battle between SEO and pay-per-click marketing. By establishing regular cross-channel audits, you eliminate budget waste, protect your higher converting search queries, and ensure every bit of marketing spend works toward measurable growth for your online business.

Need help auditing your website for SEO, Google Ads, or GA4 setup? Reach out to us at Aillum today to uncover potential savings and new insights for your Google Ads and digital marketing campaigns.