Branded PPC Is No Longer an Option
3 Minute Read
Did you know that customers who search for the name of your business are probably seeing pay-per-click ads for your competitors at the top of the SERPs? It’s true, and you need to take action right away to protect your brand—you need to start investing in branded PPC campaigns.
Safeguarding your brand in organic search is more important than ever because of big changes in the Google Ads inventory. More and more, Google is forcing advertisers to rely on broad match keywords, automation, and AI. This is leading to a lot of pay per click ads conquesting organic results—sometimes unintentionally.
So what can you do to protect your brand’s position in organic search? It’s time to fight fire with fire. You need to invest in a robust PPC strategy built around your branded keywords. Branded PPC can keep conquesting at bay and allow you to secure maximum visibility among people searching for your business name.
The Problem with Performance Max
Google’s Performance Max (a.k.a., PMAX) is a black box that gives advertisers very little control over where and how ads are displayed. With Performance Max campaigns, Google automatically fires text ads for a variety of search terms—including competitor names. This can lead to unintentional conquest ads, even if you’re not running pay per click with a conquesting component (bidding on competitors’ names intentionally).
This is why you might be seeing ads for your competitors under the Google Sponsored results when you search for your business. (Which we don’t recommend doing too much, by the way.)

Often, your competitors aren’t even bidding on your brand name. The pay per click ads are displayed due to the way PMAX and Smart Bidding work.
If you have a good relationship with the competitor, you can bring the conquesting to their attention and ask them to add your brand name to their negative keyword list. But what if you don’t have that kind of relationship with your competitors?
You need to retake your position at the top of search. A branded PPC campaign can help you do that.
Change Your Search Marketing Game with Brand Inclusions
Within Google Ads, you can add brand inclusions to your Google search marketing campaigns. Your PPC ads will only display when users search for particular brands—in this case, the brand name of your business. Use variations of your business name to cover your bases, and you should be able to cut off conquest ads on multiple fronts.
If you’re trying to play nice with competitors, you can also add brand exclusions to search and PMAX campaigns. This ensures that your pay per click ads don’t show up when people search for competing businesses, which may be important in smaller or tight-knit markets.
Need Help with Branded PPC?
Maintaining brand visibility is a search marketing priority you can no longer afford to ignore. Google has been pushing organic results further and further down the SERPs for years, and campaigns like Performance Max are only going to make it easier for companies to lose traffic and business to conquesting ads.
Now that you know this is a problem, it’s time to take control. Twelve Three Media can help you design and execute a killer branded PPC campaign that can help your business dominate search.