Brand defence — the quietest, cheapest win in Amazon PPC.

"Should I bid on my own brand name?" is one of the most debated topics in Amazon PPC. The answer in almost every real situation is yes — but the reasoning matters, because the wrong defence campaign over-spends, and the right one is one of the cheapest wins in the account.

What brand defence is defending against

Competitors are allowed to bid on your brand name. Amazon's ad system does not ban it (unlike Google for trademarked terms). That means a shopper who types your brand into the search box will see, in the top slot, either:

• Your ad, your organic listing, your variants, your A+ — a clean conversion.
• A competitor's ad, then your organic listing — a fraction of those shoppers convert on the competitor.

The cost of letting that leakage happen is the lifetime value of every lost shopper, plus the cost of re-acquiring them later. Brand defence prices the bid against that leakage, not against the immediate order ROAS.

Why brand defence looks "expensive"

Naive analysis says brand defence has terrible incrementality — the shopper was going to find you anyway. That's sometimes true. But:

• Competitors bidding on your name raise the price of your own brand keyword. If you don't bid, you pay the competitor a different way.
• The shopper who types your brand and sees three competitor ads at the top is being trained that your brand is one of many. That trains down brand recall.
• Defending the brand keyword captures it on the day a shopper switched device or session and didn't navigate directly.

The right shape of a brand-defence campaign

• Its own campaign, with brand keyword(s) only.Never mix brand and category in one campaign.
• Exact-match dominant. Phrase and broad will harvest a long tail; exact is the load-bearing match type.
• Aggressive bid, capped budget. Bid high enough to dominate the brand SERP; cap budget so it can never accidentally spend like a category campaign.
• Tracked on impression share at top-of-search, not ACOS. 90 %+ impression share on the exact brand match is the success metric.

The brand-plus-modifier zone

"YourBrand + product" terms ("yourbrand headphones", "yourbrand running shoes") are the second tier. They convert almost as well as brand alone and are even more defendable. Run them in their own ad group inside the same brand-defence campaign.