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Comment by tweetle_beetle | Hacker News Reader

> Even OUR OWN Google keywords were plastered with “Asana vs. Flow” paid links.

I don't know if this shock is in good faith, but it is very naive for a founder of a SaaS to not be aware of such marketing strategies - brand PPC campaigns are basic.

On a side note, I've often wondered how much money Google must make from people paying to fill up the ad slots for keywords which are their company name and they already rank in position 1 for. "If you don't bid for them, then your competitor might - so give us your money".

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The real story is how much they charge company A to defend their search terms vs how much they charge company B to usurp company A's search term, ie they are using all their data to extract maximum rent and not running a "fair" auction.

What do you mean?

I’ve run plenty of brand campaigns and the clicks tend to be an order of magnitude cheaper than running keywords on competitors keywords.

My experience typically lies with local companies though.

My experience is the same. I've worked with tiny startups as well as giant enterprises and the brand campaign is always super cheap.

I'm curious, what kind of CTR do you usually see for branded campaigns? I tend to keep call extensions off of branded campaigns (so existing customers scroll down to Location Listings).

I see ~30%.

And again, this is only for local service businesses.

Cheap on a per click basis. When you take into account the typically high click-through rate, Google is making more on a CPM basis(per 1000 pageviews). Google is making a much higher rate than even $5 non-branded clicks-- and this is for traffic that otherwise would be "free" with organic.

> When you take into account the typically high click-through rate, Google is making more on a CPM basis(per 1000 pageviews)

Is this your direct experience? In my campaigns it's typical for me to see 5% CTR for the keywords I target and then a ~30% CTR for branded terms (depending on the brand name)

Branded clicks are more than 6x cheaper than non branded so the CPM is still lower.

Again, that at least has been my experience. And regarding the "would have been free" argument, I've gone back and forth and have seen better results with branded campaigns than not having them on. But I've seen accounts where that was not true.

There's a line of thinking, popularized by DHH of BaseCamp, that skewers Google for allowing competitors to place ads on a brand's keywords. I can totally see how this would be infuriating. You have to pay money to just "protect" your own brand's name.

But I don't think we should ban this sort of thing, though it's a bit of a toss-up when it comes to how it may promote competition. It allows new competitors to come in and compete with established brands. But, it also allows deep-pocketed incumbents take customers away from smaller companies.

It's similar to the argument that political ads should be allowed on Facebook because it is an effective way for fresh candidates to challenge incumbents. It can also be a way for incumbents to drown out challengers with their warchest.

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