Short answer: In my opinion in the majority of cases it is worth bidding on branded searches, but you want to have control over how much you spend and how much you bid for them.
Below I will outline pros and cons and explain my reasoning.
What are brand searches?
People searching for your company name or product name. They are looking specifically for you and are likely soon to be customers or are already customers.
Arguments Against Bidding on Your Brand Terms
Cost Considerations – People are searching for you directly. So, why would you pay for those clicks? Google is pretty rich already, why give them more money?!
Money spent on branded terms could be better used targeting new customers.
Cannibalization of Organic Traffic – The traffic would have just clicked on the organic listing, why bother with additional search ads?
Showing ads on branded terms makes it so Google Ads is getting all the credit. Agencies are overstating their performance.
Argument for Bidding on Your Brand Terms
“Invert, always invert.” – Charlie Munger.
People are searching for you. They are very close to buying from you. Maybe they are your repeat customers. So, why would you NOT pay a bit to make sure they find you so you can maintain your relationship with them?
Ads on your own brand searches are a Defensive Tactic
Your competitor can bid on your brand. They can do it on purpose or as an unforeseen consequence of more broad targeting or AI driven campaigns such as Pmax. They may have bid on shoes which can trigger ads when people search for your shoe brand for example. Their shopping ads can also show on your brand searches. Whatever the reason, they can steal your customers.
In this image you can see Monday.com bidding on Asana’s brand, positioning itself as a better alternative.
More Search Results Page Real Estate
Having an ad on top of the search result page of your brand searches can push below the fold both competitor ads and their organic listings as well. If you have an ad, a top organic result and a business profile on the side, you have taken up most of the real estate on the results page.
Burberry is dominating its search results page in this example.
More Control over messaging
Search Ads give you more control over the text copy and you can optimize it for the specific audience or a promotion, new features, new product launches etc. You can also point the traffic to a specific page, different from the one in the organic listing.
It’s usually cheap – Since you are exactly what the user is searching for you will most likely have high quality scores and low cost per click.
Conclusion
I usually recommend bidding on brand searches, typically with a separate search campaign with a conservative approach and a low budget and bids and then monitor performance, volume of brand searches and auction activity to see if competitors are bidding too.
It is not a one-size-fits-all approach. There are things to consider – if there are no competitors bidding and the business has very strong organic positioning, or the cost per click of the niche is high, it may not be worth it to spend the money. If the revenue from a single lead is very high and competitors are bidding on your brand, then it will be worth it.
I think the most important thing is to be transparent with the client about the portion of sales coming from branded searches and to monitor and discuss it with them so both can make better decisions.