Bidding on a company name serves the following benefits, even if the website is organically ranked SERP1#1 on that search term.

1. Data collection at the SERP-level
2. SERP colonization

Assumptions:

• That the PPC daily budget is sufficiently padded to accommodate a high [search]:[ad display] ratio and a generous click allowance to avoid ad spend depletion and missed impression eligibility.
• If competitors are bidding on the company name, that there are 9 or less to guarantee SERP1 placement, unless the bid is adjusted for page 1 ranking.

1. Data collection at the SERP-level

Search Volume Approximation, Trending & Source-Tracking

If the assumptions above are met, the PPC impression count indicates an approximate search volume for the company name even without a click-through. Analytics only track traffic at the onset of website entry: server logs require a transaction to log the entry, and web-based analytics need the browser to execute onpage javascript or an HTML call for an external image file, and therefore cannot collect intelligence on the SERPs. PPC ads on the other hand trigger an ad impression, a metric that can be likened to a search counter.

How can this information leveraged? Take the pulse on parallel initiatives... or blunders. Cross-reference and trend this search volume, for example: does a radio spot, press release, or a public relations bollox cause a search spike?

On a side note, if the company has a generic or a puzzling name, e.g. "Cuil", bidding on homonyms or deliberate misspellings would act as a good supplement to the major SEs' alternative spelling suggestions.

PPC Tips

• Bid on the PPC Broad match type in Google AdWords. If the query is unique enough, AdWords' "Search Query Performance" reports the search string that triggered an ad click-through, which includes the Broad and Phrase match type if you have those active. For example, if the term "xyz company name complaints" is consistently searched, add it to your keyphrase inventory for direct tracking -- some online reputation management pre-emption could be in order. Conversely, if "product/service A" keyphrase is consistently appended to the company name in search, this trend could warrant a "product/service A"-specific landing page to monetize that interest.
  
• Yahoo Search Marketing and Ask Sponsored Listings have the ability to report in which DMA/locale the click-through occurred, even without a click-through on YSM by selecting the more granular geo-targeting to DMAs within "Specific Regions" instead of "Entire Market". For a nationwide campaign, you can very well select all DMAs and still cover the entire market (while excluding Canada from the default "Entire Market"). Particularly valuable for businesses that serve a national market to determine which cities have a higher familiarity with the company name.
  
  
  Screenshot source: YSM Ambassador
  
  Notice how North Platte (a small city North of the Kansas City Metro) garnished 0 clicks, but still reported impression count:
  
  
  Shawnee, KS, Independence, MO and Olathe, KS are cities within the KC metro. This is the most granular I've seen so far (Shawnee only had 48K pop. per 2000 US Census):
  
  

2. SERP Colonization

Simply put, a PPC ad text is an additional positive asset quickly and easily deployable on a search engine result page. In the context of online reputation management, one would want as many positive assets with a high degree of control over the message (as opposed to waiting for a new crawl cycle on the organic side). Do you own more than one website? You could in theory run multiple simultaneous campaigns and further the colonization as long as both sites are on separate domain names, for example: one PPC campaign for the corporate site and another for a company-owned microsite.

In closing, akin to colonizers, advertisers don't necessarily always have a "legitimate" right to claim property on the SERPs for a particular term, whether it be legal or ethical, e.g. trademarks, MFAs, and spam. Without wanting to hint at any black hat practices, please stay on the light side of the ForSE.

Nota Bene:

The data collection part of this post deals with the SERP-level. To catch the original query in Google Analytics when sync'ed with AdWords, here's a filter hack shared by Jason Billingsley at Get Elastic.

Jeremy is a certified Google AdWords Professional, a pre-Panama Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador and an accredited Microsoft adExcellence Member, and prior to BIGSHOT, has campaigned for over 150 SMB clients nationwide in both the organic and the sponsored realms of search engine marketing. Learn more about Jeremy.

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