How this was measured
Keyword data from the DataForSEO Labs API for the United States market, pulled on 2026-08-22. Cost per click is the average actually paid by advertisers, not a bid estimate from a planner tool. Spend is DataForSEO's estimate of paid traffic value and should be read as an order of magnitude, not an invoice. Anyone can verify which ads a company is currently running through the Google Ads Transparency Center, which publishes every active ad by advertiser.
Nothing here comes from inside HubSpot. This is what the outside of the account looks like, which is the only thing anyone can check.
The finding
HubSpot built what is probably the most cited content marketing operation in software. Three hundred thousand ranking keywords, an organic footprint whose equivalent traffic value runs into the tens of millions of dollars a month. The entire company narrative is that you earn attention rather than rent it.
And it still pays $37.75 a click for the phrase hubspot crm, a term where it is already the first organic result.
That is not a contradiction to mock. It is the clearest illustration available of something most advertisers get wrong in the opposite direction, and it is worth understanding before you decide whether to copy it.
Everything HubSpot buys
Forty three keywords in total, which for a company this size is a remarkably small list. Here is the top of it by search volume.
| Keyword | Monthly searches | CPC | Ad position | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| hubspot crm | 27,100 | $37.75 | 1 | Brand |
| crm programs free | 1,900 | $51.14 | 1 | Category |
| one page crm | 1,900 | $36.90 | 1 | Competitor |
| relationships crm | 1,900 | $41.73 | 2 | Category |
| hubspot web forms | 880 | $5.30 | 1 | Brand |
| hubspot tracking email | 590 | $15.36 | 1 | Brand |
| hubspot crm free tier | 480 | $71.99 | 1 | Brand |
| hubspot download | 320 | $25.81 | 1 | Brand |
| create email signature free | 260 | $7.44 | 1 | Tool |
| hubspot ads | 170 | $32.63 | 1 | Brand |
Split by type, the shape is unusual: 28 brand terms against 15 category terms. Most companies at this scale run it the other way around, with brand as a small defensive line and category as the growth engine.
What brand defence actually buys
The argument against bidding on your own name is simple and mostly right: you already rank first, so you are paying for a click you would have received for nothing. Every dollar is cannibalised.
The argument for it is narrower and holds in three situations, all of which apply here:
- Competitors are bidding on you. HubSpot appears on one page crm, a competitor's product name. Competitors do the same in reverse. If you vacate your own brand results, the first thing a buyer searching for you sees belongs to someone else.
- The ad controls the destination, the organic result does not. A brand search can land on a blog post from four years ago. A brand ad lands on the page you chose today, with the offer you are running this quarter.
- Free tier products live and die on signup friction. Note hubspot crm free tier at $71.99 a click, the most expensive term on the entire list. That is not brand defence, that is buying the exact moment someone decides to try the product.
The part that does not transfer: this works for HubSpot because their brand search volume is enormous and their free product converts. For a company nobody searches by name yet, brand bidding buys almost nothing, because there is almost nothing to defend. Copying the tactic without the volume is how small advertisers spend a budget on their own existing customers.
What to take from it
Look at your own split before deciding anything. If most of your paid budget goes to your own name and your brand search volume is small, you are almost certainly buying traffic you already had. If competitors are visibly bidding on your name and you are not there, the calculation changes, and it changes fastest when your product has a free tier or a trial.
The check takes ten minutes: search your own brand, see who is buying it, then look the same advertisers up in the Transparency Center to see what else they run. Everything in this article came from that kind of public data.
If you want that read done on your own account, that is what the paid media audit is. And for what a click costs across six industries, see the paid media cost index.
Figures are third party estimates of publicly observable advertising, published August 2026. They describe what is being bought, not what it returns: no revenue, conversion or ROI figure here is claimed or implied, because none of that is visible from outside. HubSpot is not a client and had no involvement in this analysis.