Bing Study Shows Branded PPC Campaigns Drive More Traffic

First, a Little Background on PPC

In eCommerce and digital engagement, there’s an inescapable truth: You can have the most compelling website in the industry, but you’ll never make a sale if your customers don’t know it exists.

This is great for companies with an easily recognized brand, such as Amazon, Apple or Target, but what about small companies looking to grow their audience?

For most businesses, their primary source of traffic comes from popular search engines such as Google and Bing, so technical teams devote a lot of time optimizing their content to appear in organic results and invest heavily in PPC campaigns on Google Ads and Bing Ads for lucrative keywords customers use. For example, a store that sells car wash supplies would purchase ads for “car wash supplies” and related terms.

Things get less certain when your customers know your brand well enough to include it in their search since the page they want typically appears as the first organic result. Should you still purchase PPC campaigns for these branded terms? This is a question that’s controversial, even among digital marketers.

If a customer is searching for your brand, they already know about your site and use the search engine to find your products. Many marketers feel that branded PPC is a waste of resources – and even worse, you risk cannibalizing your organic results since customers will click on the ad instead of your listing, leading to you paying for a click you’d otherwise get free.

However, according to a study from Bing, this isn’t the case. While it’s true that some organic traffic is lost, most increased traffic comes at the expense of your competitors rather than your listings.

Bing Ads Holiday Campaign Results

Bing collected impression data for more than 3 million retail branded searches, using most of the keywords from this industry. Their team split the data into two primary groups: searches where the company had a PPC campaign for branded terms and searches where brands relied only on organic listings. The company monitored customer behavior, and the results were surprising.

For searches where the website didn’t have an ad, 60% of customers chose the brand’s top organic listing. The only thing surprising about this number is that it’s so low since these customers were searching specifically for that company.

When a website did have a branded PPC ad at the top of the result, they captured an astonishing 91% of customer traffic between that ad and the organic listing.

Branded PPC Campaigns Reduce Competitor Traffic

If a customer is searching specifically for your brand, why do 40% of them still choose a competitor? According to Bing, it all comes down to the position of that organic link in the search results:

This is potentially surprising for digital marketers who are accustomed to ignoring “irrelevant” ads that don’t go to the website we’re looking for, but this clearly isn’t typical behavior.

Like Google, Bing places ads above organic listings, meaning that your competitor’s ad appears above your organic listing if they win the bid. For customers just looking for “car wash supplies,” they might see that competitor’s ad with a cheaper price or creative marketing and click on it instead. Bing Ads and Google Ads both depend on this behavior, which is why they show those revenue-generating ads above the free organic listings.

PPC Doesn’t Cannibalize Organic Results

A common misconception about Branded bids is that you end up paying for traffic you’d get for free anyway. While Bing’s study did show that potentially 11% of ad traffic came from otherwise organic sources, 31% came directly from your competitors, with most of it coming from the ads they took out against that branded term.

It’s also important to remember that the total traffic these sites received increased, meaning that those websites had more opportunities for conversion since branded searches show high levels of intent.