The "Bad" – not running paid search ads on your business name
I saw this great article in Search Engine Land yesterday which dovetails perfectly with my prior post. While my colleague Nathan Hanks put forth the logical business reasons to "own" your name by bidding on your brand keywords, David Roth gives a semi-scientific way to prove the value. He recommends that you run a test site visits both with and without the PPC ad for your brand name and then determine the cannibalization/lift that is caused by using the text ad. Here's his definition:
“Lift” is the net amount of
traffic that is added to the mix by virtue of the PPC ad.
Cannibalization is the portion of PPC ad traffic that comes at the
expense of the organic link. If you can quantify cannibalization and
lift in any situation, you can then begin to think intelligently about
what to do.
It sounds like the research proves the value since David says he was ecstatic with the results of his test.
A bit counter-intuitive. Interesting.