If you've been running Google ads for 45 seconds or longer, you know that there's a philosophical war being waged on the battlefield. That is brand traffic. Do I bid on my brand traffic? Now, I have been on both sides of the spectrum, oftentimes in this same day because it's hyper dependent to your situation. So on one side you have people saying, I'm gonna get that traffic anyway. Why on earth would I pay for it? On the other side, you have people saying it's hubris to believe that, and all I'm gonna do is posit some. Concepts here that will allow you to make the decision for yourself based off of your own circumstances. The first puzzle piece that you should possibly think of when you're talking about branch traffic is poaching, are other people bidding on your brand? And these aren't always competitors, by the way. They can be alternatives. If I were Greyhound Bus, I'd be bidding on all of Southwest Airlines traffic because I can get you there a whole lot cheaper than Southwest can. And Southwest people are looking for the cheapest possible form of transit. As an example, you don't necessarily have to worry about competitors. You have to worry about competitive alternatives. Is your traffic being poached from a paid ad perspective? And if it is, it probably makes a lot of sense to bid on your brand traffic because A, you're gonna pay exponentially less than your competitors are. So that's first and foremost. B, you're going to be far more relevant than they are, so you're gonna rank higher. And then C, you're gonna put yourself in a position to protect. The entirety of your ad spend from being stolen right at the bottom of the funnel. So if your paid traffic is being poached. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you should do this, just if people are advertising on your name, because they might do that no matter what, and there's nothing you do to stop it. It's if they're doing so effectively. If you think they're actually being able to draw people away from you, then you should bid on your branded traffic. I can tell you I had one of the highest performing real estate investment campaigns on the planet for seven years, and one of our core strategies was to go into a new geography and just bid on whatever investor was spending the most money on radio, television, and newspaper. And it worked. It worked. And those poor suckers had no idea what we were doing. they should have been bidding on their own name because they would've. Protected themselves from us, especially at the time, the real estate industry was so antiquated. They were just so far behind that times they didn't even know we were doing it. So we were able to go in there and just swoop in and take this literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of these advertisers I saw their ad spend. They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in radio specifically and genning up all of this interest. And what happens when somebody hears a radio ad, they Google it. As a ubiquitous truth. don't care how many times they repeat the phone number at the end of the ad, nobody's ever written that phone number down. They're just like, oh yeah, the fast home buyers I'll search for them later. Search for fast home buyers. Bam, my ad. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads, and we were able to poach them. So protect yourself from being poached if it's happening. That's one reason why you'd wanna bid on brand traffic. A kissing cousin to that is the fact that if somebody's bidding on your brand and you are not, They're paying way less than they would be otherwise. Google's an auction system based off of relevance. It's based off the V Victory Auction Model, which is developed in like the 1700 or something, and it says the second the highest bidder wins the bid, pays the second highest bidders price. So what that means is because you're the most relevant result, you're going to rank the highest and pay the least, but the amount that you pay sets the floor. If you don't enter the auction, then the floor is set much lower. But as soon as you enter the auction, not only do you get to set the floor, but the floor that you pay and the floor that they pay are disparate. Because it's ba, it's greater on a curve cuz they're massively irrelevant. So if people are bidding on your branded traffic, yes you wanna protect your brand, but you can also go in there and cost your competitors a significant amount of money, which is, I think, strategically sound. that kind of all lives in the competitor camp. Now, when you bid on your brand traffic, the other thing you're giving yourself, and this is getting more and more important with every passing day, you're giving yourself visibility into what's actually working from a conversion perspective. Google has a massive attribution problem, and actually if you ask me, it's not a problem at all. I think they can see all the attribution. I think they're not giving it to us because they're terrified of anti privacy, antitrust, anti whatever, regardless of why. We can't see full conversion paths any longer unless we pay for the data bidding on your brain of traffic unveils those conversion paths, and it can do so in ways that help you make educated decisions. For other campaigns and campaign types, including non-Google ad related campaigns, Facebook ads, for instance, if you bid on branded traffic, you'll notice that your conversion path will end with brand traffic from a paid perspective. But then you'll be able to see in some instances, the referral source, especially if you're using analytics properly, capturing first data first party data properly, et cetera. So bidding on branded traffic lifts the veil slightly. And again, it depends on, what business you're in, how long your sales cycle is, those types of things. what kind of multi-touch environment you're in. Google did a study and found it, took 20 clicks to sell a candy bar, but 500 clicks to sell an airline ticket. So you have to ask yourself, where between candy bar and airline ticket is my product or service? And in terms of how many touches we're going to receive and the more touches. The more likely it is that you're losing data and bidding on your brand traffic, even though you're paying for traffic that you might get. Otherwise, the visibility is worth paying for, especially because branded traffic tends to be far less expensive. Otherwise far less expensive than other types of paid traffic campaigns, I should say. Next point. You get to decide what the narrative is. the primary point against building on branded traffic is, dude, I'm gonna get this anyway. I rank phenomenally well, organically, they're searching for my brand name or name of my product. I'm already the, not only position one, I'm positions one, two, and three, and I'm in the local pack, and I'm in the video pack. I'm gonna get the traffic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Fine, fine. I hand it to you, but you're not gonna be able to control the narrative, what they see. Google decides it's based off of metadata or onsite descriptions. Google delivers content that you don't get to decide at all. You get to influence, but you don't get to define, and paid traffic is sensitive traffic and they're in a very specific point of the funnel. So when you bid on branded traffic, the offer that you make is specific. The landing page that they visit can be very, very specific. The way you remarket to them is specific, so you get to control the narrative and that con, that controlled narrative, can absolutely be worth it, especially if you have a really diverse offering. If you have multiple products, multiple services, a massive catalog. All you're doing when you're allowing people to go back to, your root domain, let's say, is you're keeping 'em in the messy middle. You're keeping 'em confused. And for prospects that have already found their way down to, the middle or the bottom of the funnel, or even the bottom of the middle of the funnel, if you don't mind me convoluting the conversation. It stands to reason that you'd want to be able to control what is it they see and how they see it. So what my advice to most advertisers is don't max out your brand campaigns because that that is where it gets a little bit too excessive. I would buy the 20% of the branded traffic that makes 80% of the impact and that becomes pretty easy to find, to be frank because branded traffic is one of the few campaign types where conversion tracking is still rock solid cuz it is extreme bottom of the funnel. And you do generally see results. Right away. where other campaigns it takes longer. Results are diluted. You have to worry about time lag. Brand campaigns are nice because you can see how effective they are and the. Brand traffic can be segmented according to a myriad of factors, and so figure out within that available segmentation what branded traffic is working for you and bid on that branded traffic. And you can do that, by the way, simply by limiting the amount of money you have to spend in your brand campaign. Google's gonna do this for you and say like, oh, okay, we have a limited amount of money. We have a certain target. Goal define inside of the campaign and all traffic is a bell curve. We're gonna go to the center of the bell curve and that's the best way to make sure that you're being efficient and effective with your brand traffic. I do believe and agree with advertisers and businesses that say, look, I'm gonna get this traffic regardless. Why would I pay for that? It's a good point. it's a balance of risks. So based off of everything that I posited here, I would turn this back around on you and say, okay, well when would you pay for it? Cuz it's not never. Like, it's not never, it's somewhere between 1% and 99%. It's not zero and it's not a hundred. And then you get to decide on the spectrum what the right answer is for you, and you're never gonna get it perfect. It's an iterative process. So I'd love to hear from you. What are other reasons that you've been on brand traffic that I'm not even thinking of. What smarter, better, more wicked ninja hacks do you have? And the other thing that I'm really interested in is how do you speak to brand traffic? What are the best offers that you've noticed for brand traffic? And maybe even more importantly, how do you steal other people's brand traffic? Cuz that's fun, that's fun to do, especially when you have snarky competitors out there and you have the opportunity to eat their lunch. So I hope this is helpful. I'd love to hear from you. Hit me in the comments. Let come subscribe. I'll see you tomorrow.