This has always been a question for clarification by most beginners in PPC. One says, “71% of the total traffic comes from Direct Traffic, which means most of the users are aware of the brand then, what is the need of spending budget by bidding on Brand terms?

It is essential to be present both on Sponsored & Organic listings to drive user’s attention and impression. Again, it’s only on the brand that your bid value is 5-10% that of Generic or Specific keyword bid value while being in top 1-3 position. There are other reasons too, why you should bid on the brand queries;

• If you are not bidding, then your competitor will bid on your brand terms and take away your share of profit easily.
• The new feature called Sitelinks (Ad Extension) suits very well with Brand, since sitelinks works only when your ad is shown in 1-3 position, and with Brand, you are easy enough to be in 1-3 without any concern that may not be the same for Generic or Specific keyword where the competition is much aggressive. (Below is the screenshot on sitelinks for your reference)

There is a complication while building up your Brand completely to a new target market audience. In that case, you have to concentrate much on generic and specific keyword with brand related adcopies, so that users are getting aware of the ads mainly targeting brand theme.

For example; Many online and offline users might be knowing about Norton Antivirus and McAfee Antivirus, but rarely about Kaspersky which is new in the antivirus products. So gradually showing up its Brand theme related adcopies on generic terms like “anti virus” will help to spread brand awareness and gradually improve its establishment in the specific market to be in competition in coming days. Below is a screenshot for your reference)

Reader, it becomes mandatory for any PPC specialist to act proactively during situational cases, which happens occasionally. Campaign management is the birth right of every SEM/PPC specialist and there are conditions where external factor or changes does impact your campaign equally as internal does, and a PPC person has to react faster than the normal way.

I’m listing out few such conditions or situations for your knowledge for better PPC ROI;

1. In case of a travel related campaign;
   1. Pause those destination name which encountered earthquake, terrorist attack, plane crash, or any sort of natural calamity or human disaster to avoid unwanted clicks.
   2. Add the above terms as negative in your campaign negative list at campaign/adgroup level based on your campaign strategy.
   3. In case of ecommerce related sites;
      1. If any order is out of stock, then please pause those product adgroups until the stocks are back again.
      2. In case of Adwords/AdCenter maintenance time;
         1. Schedule your ad serving timing with required percentage during those times using Ad Scheduling feature, since you won’t be able to make any changes during the respective maintenance timing respectively.

Conclusion:

A little proactive at the right time will save you huge bucks of unwanted cost in PPC. I would be happy to hear other situational grounds that can help PPC externally.