If you don't advertise on your brand keywords, your competitor will. We spend quiet a lot on our brand keywords to avoid competitor siphoning off our brand traffic.
Isn't this trademark violation? I'm not from the US, but years ago I used to work for a local index-style search engine (before Google ate everyone's meal), and IIRC we consulted our lawyers and came to the conclusion that this is not legal, and we didn't sell these sort of ads.
Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
31–40 of 95 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
#32Marketers often work with middle man companies to create the ads, you'd be surprised I think if you heard how many times the ad owner never even looks at the results of how it looks to customers. But also lots of the other reasons posted here are very true too.
SERIOUSLY???? I have to beg my clients to stop googling themselves!!!
In all seriousness, clients obsess about their ads and how it appears way more than the agencies do...They often don't realize that it can hurt their CTR, their quality scores, and pollute the data used to measure results... Google built an ad preview tool for this very reason.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
#33A group of economists at Ebay ran a series of experiments to measure the value or promoted links when the brand already own the top organic link http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/Tadelis.pdf They find no measurable short term benefit to purchasing the "Ebay" keyword on sales.
Yeah, ask them how they felt about it when they turned adwords off.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
#34I got in to a debate with my business partner about this very subject. It turns out non-technical people tend not to distinguish between organic results and paid results. For example, he personally clicks our brand based ad instead of our organic result when he googles us. I had to explain that we were spending money every time he did that.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
#35Side question: would you click on the ad or on the organic search result? Why?
If it's a company I like then I click the organic listing. On the other hand, if it's an ad for someone who needs the money less than google does then I do my part and donate to the google foundation.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
#36Localization is also one of the reasons. For eg.,
I live in japan and when I search for amazon in google, the organic result is .com but the top ad link is .co.jp. And I always click the ad link.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
#37Brand reinforcement. The more you see it, the more you know it, the more likely you are to trust / use the brand. It's simple really.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
#38Yes - It is mainly so that a competitor doesn't show up above your organic search results by buying your keywords and it adds another line item for your brand.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
#39Googling in Munich (logged in in Chrome) for squarespace I get an ad for siteground.com.
Googling "squarespace -squarespace" I get the ad for squarespace without competing ads or organics.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies buy ads when they are the top result in search?
#40This study ( http://searchengineland.com/google-research-even-if-you-rank... ) is a bit old and possibly biased (since sponsored by Google) but when I worked in SEM the experience we had was the same which was the top organic position + the top paid position netted overall more traffic to our site than with just the organic position alone. The other considerations are: 1) Brand SEM terms are cheap - if you own the br…
Great explanation - I'll add two things. 1. If you're not there, someone else is. If Nike didn't buy brand terms, adidas would and would steal tons of customers. 2. Paid results (and other results like maps, shopping, etc) often push organic results below the fold so no one sees them. You need to be above the fold.
Lol, so it's extortion by google? Superb model!