As you know reducing bid rate can do a similar job, but currently i have one test campaign that Google seems to be going out of its way to break this technique, bid too low, not shown on first page increase bids get top positions.

advertising special promotions there raises CTRs and CVRs!

It was much of a choice, it usually was between 1.5 and 2.5 but it kept the client happy and also shaved some % of the average cpc for the brand terms which gives you an even better ROI.

The caveat is that if your competitor is wanting to be in that position and your brand terms leads to sales/leads its sometimes best to be #1 in paid and organic and accept the costs.

@Ulf The issue I am trying to address here is whether or not users would click the organic results if the ads weren’t there. That is what you need to know to decide if PPC is delivering useful *incremental* value. As @David says quality score is very high for brand ads to only looking at the PPC data will show a successful campaign even if it is not delivering incremental value

@David I have never heard of anyone using position preference bidding with brand terms. Generally I am against position preference bidding. Is this something you have done yourself or just an idea you’ve had recently?

The reason you usually get users only clicking on your brand ads is that your quality score is so much higher than the competitors you are shown at the top just below the search box making it look like the first result, so play with preferred placements :)

If Pay per click Advertising is to be a cash generator, then one must decide where it makes sense to stop. Maybe one can try experimenting with different efficiency targets to evaluate the ROI for each increment.

The problem is that the client doesn’t understand and if the PPC is converting slightly higher and the average CPC is not too high it can be accepted. The problem is where the PPC rate paid for brand traffic is not sustainable and can often be the desperate actions of a PPC agency struggling to continuous provide campaign improvements as they promised to the client in their initial pitch.

As for giving a boost, i have certainly seen this but without the direct correlation of data as Google offers some of their bigger advertisers you maybe wasting time arguing with a client. If you decrease or increase PPC it seems to benefit all site traffic.

PPC agencies can benefit from the knowledge gained by the web analyst and it shouldnt be a race to the bottom…