Is this PPC claim true?

[FBS]

I want to optimise our marketing spend and was concerned about the high conversion rate of one of our products. When I suggested stopping PPC I was offered this advice:

'It is vital to keep spending on brand terms to prevent competitors bidding on your brand terms and taking the top positions'

This this true and if so why would anyone want to bid on our brand terms?

[RangeMarketing]

Hi!

A competitor of yours might bid on terms associated with your brand to try to steal some of your branded search traffic. While this is not always the case, if you find it to be true it might make sense to continue spending to maintain those higher ad positions in order to keep most of your branded search traffic.

Does that make sense? Hope that helps!

[Ray-pp]

Bidding on your brand name(s) is, most often, a very good idea. Many case studies, and my personal experience, have shown that bidding on your brand increases CTR for your organic listings as well. In addition, the CPA for branded campaigns tends to be extremely low and well worth the spend.

Preventing competitors is less of a reason to continue to bid. Even with you bidding, they can still bid on your brand. However, it will cost them much higher CPCs since their Qscore will most likely be poor.

What they've eluded to is that you want to consume as much of the above the fold positioning as possible and having a paid listing next to your organic listing helps achieve that goal.

[TheZenAgency]

Hi

If you dont target your brand terms believe me their is a competitor that will. I would advise against giving it to them on the cheap.

It can often look quite powerful if you are ranking well organically and also have PPC adverts at the top of the page.

have a read of this for further insight http://searchengineland.com/bidding-brand-terms-196098

[MonicaOConnor]

Since these are branded terms, I would recommend that you do a simple search on Google to see if your competitors are already paying for your branded term. Not all of them do, especially if your branded term is irrelevant to your products.

More likely than not, if you are ranking 1 organically and not paying for your branded term in PPC you will still get upwards of 90% of the clicks. Most people searching by brand already know what they are looking for and where they want to buy it. They will look for your SERP. If you want to test the theory, turn off the paid campaign for a week and see if the traffic on branded terms increases organically or if you see a huge decline in traffic. AdWords is easy to Beta. Maybe it isn't cutting spend altogether, but dropping your bid to position three. Having two listings next to each other is the holy grail of SERP positioning.