Brand Bidding: Should You Bid on the Brands You Sell?

Brand bidding is buying search ads against a brand name. If you stock other people’s products, the brand name in question is usually not yours, and that changes the question from a marketing one into a permissions one: what Google allows, what the manufacturer allows, and whether the click is worth buying at all.

Almost everything written about brand bidding is written for the brand owner trying to detect it and stop it. This is written for the other side of it: the authorised dealer, the reseller, the distributor who sells somebody else’s catalogue and has to decide whether to bid on it.

What brand bidding actually means

A keyword is the word or phrase you choose so your ad can be matched to a search. Bidding on a brand name means adding that name to a campaign so that when somebody searches it, you are eligible to appear. Nothing about the mechanism is special. What makes it a separate topic is that trademarks are involved, and trademarks have their own policy.

For a reseller the searches in question are things like the manufacturer’s name on its own, the name with a model number, or the name with a buying word attached. Those are frequently the highest intent searches in the whole account, because the person has already decided what they want and is only choosing where to buy it.

There are two different questions hiding in the term

The phrase covers two situations that have almost nothing in common, and conflating them is the reason most advice on it reads as contradictory.

Most of the ranking articles on this subject answer the first column. A reseller lives in the second, and the second has rules attached.

There is a third case that is not on this table because it is a separate problem with separate rules: bidding on the other dealers who stock the identical product. That one is covered in competitor brand bidding for resellers.

Are you allowed to bid on a brand you sell?

As a matter of Google policy, generally yes, and the policy says so in an unusually direct way. Google’s trademark policy carries a specific provision for resellers: ads may use a trademark where the landing pages are “primarily dedicated to selling or clearly facilitating the sale of products or services, components, replacement parts, or compatible products or services corresponding to the trademark”.

There is a condition attached, and it is the one dealers fail. The policy states that “the ad and landing page must be clear as to whether the advertiser is a reseller or informational site”. An ad that reads as though you are the manufacturer is a different thing from an ad that reads as though you stock the manufacturer, and only the second one is what the provision protects.

Keywords and ad text are governed by different rules

This is the distinction that matters most, and it is the one almost nobody states plainly.

Google’s trademark policy governs what appears in the ad text. The use of trademarks as keywords sits on the list of things the policy does not restrict at all. Bidding on a brand name and writing that name into your headline are two separate decisions with two separate rule sets, and a trademark complaint against your ad text does not stop you being matched to the search.

• Keyword targeting. Not restricted by the trademark policy. This is what decides whether you can appear on the search at all.
• Ad text. Restricted, with the reseller provision above as the route through it. This is what a trademark owner can complain about.
• The landing page. Not a policy surface in the same way, but it carries the condition that decides whether the reseller provision applies to you.

A dealer who is told that a brand does not allow brand bidding, and who pauses the keywords in response, has usually conceded more than was asked for. Often what was actually objected to was the headline.

The dealer agreement is the constraint that actually bites

Google’s policy is the floor, not the ceiling. The document that governs you is the one you signed with the manufacturer, and a dealer agreement can restrict things Google is perfectly happy to serve.

Brand bidding clauses are common in dealer and distribution agreements, and they vary enormously: some ban bidding on the brand name outright, some allow it but forbid the name in ad copy, some allow everything except bidding on the brand name paired with the words that describe the manufacturer’s own store. The enforcement mechanism is the same one behind minimum advertised price: they stop supplying you.

Read it before you build the campaign rather than after the email arrives. If the agreement is silent, that is worth a conversation with your account manager rather than an assumption, because “silent” and “permitted” are not the same thing when the relationship is the asset.

What it is worth, and when it is worth nothing

Assume you are allowed. The next question is whether the click earns its cost, and the honest answer is that it depends on what is already on the page above you.

When it is usually worth it

1. The manufacturer does not run search ads. Plenty of brands sell only through dealers and never open a Google Ads account. The auction is then dealers against dealers, and the name is simply a high intent keyword.
2. You rank badly for the brand organically. If you are not on page one for the name, the ad is not cannibalising a click you already had.
3. The brand name with a model number. These are the searches where somebody has chosen the product and is choosing a shop, which is the easiest sale a reseller gets.
4. You have something the others do not. Stock when the category is short, a delivery date, freight included, financing. When price is fixed by policy, the ad is the only place to say it before the click.

When it usually is not

1. You already rank first organically and nobody is bidding. You are buying a click that was arriving anyway. Not always wrong, but it should be a tested decision rather than a default.
2. The brand name alone, with no buying word. A large share of that traffic is people looking for the manufacturer’s support page, warranty, or careers.
3. The manufacturer is bidding hard on its own name. The trademark owner usually has the better quality signals on its own term, and you are paying a premium to come second on a search that was never going to be cheap.

The test is incrementality, not return on ad spend. A brand campaign reports well because the person had already decided; the number that matters is what happens to total orders when it is off, which means pausing it for long enough to read and accepting a noisy answer. That is an uncomfortable experiment to run and it is the only one that settles the argument.

Bidding on your own store name

Your own store name is a different case with none of the policy attached, and the arguments are worth separating from the reseller question above.

For a reseller specifically, there is one argument that does not apply to brands: your store name search is frequently contested by the manufacturers you stock, by marketplaces carrying the same catalogue, and by comparison sites. If the first three results on your own name are somewhere a customer can buy the identical product from somebody else, the defensive case is stronger than it would be for a brand with an exclusive product.

The argument against bidding on branded keywords of your own is always the same one: you already rank first, so you are paying for a click that was free. It is a reasonable argument and it is right more often than the agencies selling brand campaigns admit. It is also not the whole picture.

1. An ad occupies space the organic listing does not. Sitelinks, a promotion extension and a delivery message push the next result further down. On a phone that can be the difference between one visible option and three.
2. You control the destination. Your organic result lands people on whatever Google chose. An ad lands them on the page you want, which for a dealer is usually the category holding the brand rather than the home page.
3. It is the cheapest traffic in the account, so the arithmetic is forgiving even when the incremental gain is modest.
4. It is insurance against a bad week. A ranking drop, a site migration or somebody else deciding to bid on you all get absorbed quietly if the campaign already exists.

The way to settle it is to turn it off and read total orders rather than the campaign report, which is the same test described earlier and is just as uncomfortable here. Whether it earns its cost is an empirical question, and it is one of the first things I look at when I take over an account. I have written more about how I run paid search for dealers and retailers.

What to do when a brand tells you to stop

It happens, and it is usually an email rather than a formal complaint. Three things worth knowing before you reply.

• Find out what is actually being objected to. Ad text and keyword targeting are separate, and the complaint is frequently about the former. Offering to remove the name from your headlines may resolve the whole thing while leaving the traffic intact.
• Check the agreement rather than the email. What a marketing coordinator believes the policy to be and what you contracted to are not reliably the same document.
• Weigh the account, not the campaign. If the line is a meaningful share of revenue, the brand campaign is not worth the supply relationship, and that arithmetic is usually obvious once it is written down.

A trademark owner can also complain to Google directly about ad text. That is a slower route and it does not touch your keywords, but it is worth understanding that the manufacturer has a lever that does not require your cooperation.

The check I would run this week

Three things, in this order:

1. Search your three biggest brands as a customer would, on a phone. Who is above you? The manufacturer, another dealer, a marketplace, or nobody? That single look answers most of the question this article poses, and almost nobody does it.
2. Read your own brand ad copy against the reseller condition. Would a stranger know from the headline and the landing page that you are a shop carrying the brand rather than the brand? If not, that is the fix, and it is a copy change rather than a strategy change.
3. Split brand and non-brand into separate campaigns if they are not already. Blended together, the brand searches flatter everything around them and you cannot see what the rest of the account is doing. This is the change most likely to alter a decision you make next month.

If the answers are uncomfortable, that is normal, and it is roughly what an audit exists to put in order.

Questions people ask