Main Brand Search Results/NO PPC

[animalstyle]

Historically I see large companies sponsoring their main search term via AdWords in order for their paid ad to display above their main organic result.

Recently I've noticed some major brands not displaying a PPC ad unit above a search for their main term. Take eBay or Amazon as examples:

Whats going on here? Is this something reserved for just brands of a certain size? Are they pushing competing PPC ads down somehow? One thing I notice is they all have the graph displaying on the sidebar.

edit: do see a ppc ad for a mobile search for 'amazon' but not desktop. They are sponsoring these terms for sure.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

They don't even restrict other people using Trademarks (https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en-GB) in their keywords but I suppose for 'navigational' queries like that I'm not sure how you would make any money since you can't pretend to be amazon or ebay without violating adwords rules. So if nobody is bidding on them, I guess they don't need to bid on them either since they have all the real estate. That would be my guess but I don't really get involved with PPC.