Brand bidding
Brand bidding is paying for ads on searches for someone else's brand, such as an affiliate, a reseller or a competitor bidding on your store's name.
How it works
A search for your store’s name goes to an ad auction like any other, and other advertisers can enter it too. Your own brand ads compete with theirs for the same branded search. A reseller’s or a competitor’s ad can win the click and take the shopper to their own site.
When the other bidder is your affiliate partner, a shopper who was already looking for you clicks the partner’s ad. The sale can then be credited to the partner’s link, and you pay a commission on it.
With partners, the lever you control is the agreement. It can forbid bidding on your name, its misspellings and your domain. It can also require the partner to add a list of your brand terms to their own account as negative keywords or brand exclusions. What to put into the agreement is covered in affiliates bidding on your brand name.
Where you see it
Auction insights in Google Ads, opened for your brand Search campaign, lists the domains of other advertisers whose ads showed in the same auctions. Its overlap rate shows how often their ad got an impression when yours did.
Example
Example store, not client data.
An affiliate partner bids on the tableware shop’s name. In a month, 20 of the shop’s 300 orders come through the partner’s ad on searches for that name. At an average order value of 600, that is 12,000 of revenue. At an 8% commission, the shop pays the partner 960 for buyers who had already typed the shop’s name.
Not to be confused with
- Brand exclusions — a setting in your own campaigns that keeps them off searches for the brands you list. Other advertisers can still bid on your name.
- Channel conflict — partners or marketplace sellers offering your products, often cheaper, next to you. Brand bidding is about who pays for ads on searches for your name.
Right and wrong readings
- Wrong: “The 20 orders are extra sales from the affiliate channel.” Right: each of those buyers typed the shop’s name before seeing the partner’s ad, so the partner is credited with customers who were already looking for the shop.