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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Now that you mention that, does anyone else find it incredibly scummy that Google shows ads for a company, leading to the company's website, above the first result, which is also the company's website when I search for something like the company name?

The ad is minimally distinguished from the content, and most users don't care anyway, they'll click the top result and cost the company money that they could have saved if Google didn't present that ad there.

I guess, however, that the alternative is an ad for Bar, Inc appearing above Foo, Inc when you search for "foo, inc". In that case, it feels like extortion ("if you want us to show your website first when users search for you, buy the ad").

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Some SEO guy once told me companies decide to buy these ads because it costs essentially nothing (b/c CTR is almost 100%) and improves the advertisers quality score.

This is the correct answer. Metrics that determine cost for these specific ads are so high, that the cpc is very low. This also ensures competitors don't buy it out, but also allows a company to slightly alter the consumer's journey (by choosing the messaging in the ad).

Yep. It's trivially easy to buy on your own branded keywords (your relevancy is unmatched) and very cheap. Sure, you'll cannibalize some of your organic traffic, but the risk of a competitor advertising on your keywords is too great

Ah, thanks, I didn't know price was inversely proportional to CTR.

I saw exactly that a few hours ago.

http://i.imgur.com/7ymtPjd.png (Search for "united airlines" and the top link on the page is for "alaska airlines")

You are correct and that is scummy and should happen, but you misinterpreted (the post is difficult to understand, I had to read it 2 or 3 times).

What he's saying is that it is scummy to show an ad for unitedairlines.com when the second result is unitedairlines.com thus making the company spend money on the click but the user would click anyway, because the first would be unitedairlines.com even without the ad!

Sorry, yes, that's what I meant.

Advertisers are in control of whether they show their ads for brand queries. Google has certainly been pushing for it, but there are many legit reasons for advertisers to bid on brand terms, even when they rank highly themselves.

A couple off the top of my head:

- Helps push competitor's down that might bid on or rank organically for your brand term

- Gives you control over sitelinks (you have much less over organic sitelinks)

- Helps build account-level Quality Score which ultimately helps control CPCs account-wide

- Let's you control your message

- Let's you control your audience (such as by using RLSA to retarget to specific audiences, exclude others, etc.)

- Gain a MUCH deeper level of understanding on how people are searching for your brand in context with other touchpoints

- Gain some very good data on brand query volume and composition that could lead to other insights

The list goes on. There are definitely some cases where it isn't necessary or warranted though. However a savvy marketer will weigh the pros and cons and not make a snap judgement that "brand terms are bad" since they are often worth the minimal expense.

Source: Do this for a living and helped lead the paid search group at a top search agency

I intentionally avoid clicking on the first link when it's an ad, I don't care if it's relevant or not. Yes, it's very scummy.

I also use DDG as my primary and only resort to Google when absolutely necessary - and even then Google usually fails me too.

I was quite happy to run those ads on my brand. 33% of clicks on the paid ad resulted in a sale. $200+ sale from $0.50 click? Yes please.

You have super high relevancy with the ad. So the quality score is high and the actual price gets lowered a bit.

I also ran them defensively, since I did not want any other advertiser to have the #1 position.

Isn't a $200 sale from a free click better? (I see now that there are other arguments for running these ads, but this doesn't feel like a legitimate one to me, assuming you organically rank #1 for your brand.)

There are things you can't do when bidding on competitor's brand names, but essentially, you're correct.

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