At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s tough out there for Paid Search marketers. Budgets are being slashed, targets remain as high as ever and our clients have increasingly sophisticated knowledge of Paid Search which leads to tougher questions for those running the accounts. With such a challenging financial climate, there’s one question that comes up over and over again.
Why are we paying to bid on our own brand name?
On the surface, this question makes sense. Brand spend can make up a significant chunk of an account’s total budget and, hopefully, the SEO team are doing the right things to make sure that the official site appears in top position when a new customer makes a search. If you’re already appearing at the top of the results page, does that mean that these campaigns are a redundant tactic?
Not quite - here’s a few good reasons why Brand is still an important part of Paid Search strategy.
1) Competition
A well executed SEO strategy will put a business at the top of the organic listings, but it can’t do anything about what happens above that in the paid results.
Picture this: you’re a Paid Search marketer battling it out for conversions in a competitive industry. One day you’re looking at the Auction Insights report and you notice that one of your main competitors has completely vanished from the graph. What’s your next move?
If you’re anything like me, you’d immediately push budget into a campaign bidding on their brand name with the goal of stealing clicks, conversions and market share while their campaigns are turned off. Sure, some of those searchers will scroll down to the Organic listing but if you’re in an industry where products are comparable between businesses you’re almost guaranteed to steal some customers and grow your own brand.
On the flip side, if you’re a business that’s turned off your Brand ads, you lose valuable data from Auction Insights about what your competitors are doing with your brand name and how the market is changing. Without this information, you need to rely on third party tools that don’t give you the full picture of what’s happening in the search space.
2) Extending Your Reach
A deceptively simple one here - a Paid Search ad with all the extensions applied takes up more physical space on the results page. With this in place, competitors will be pushed down below the fold, meaning more likelihood of a click coming through to your business even if competitors are heavily bidding on your own brand name.
Alongside taking up space, making use of extensions means that you can share additional messaging that would be lost if you were solely relying on an Organic listing. Relevant sitelinks, promo extensions and contact details give extra information to searchers that might just push them over the line into paying customers.
3) Sending A Message
One of the most underrated elements of Brand campaigns is the ability to rapidly change messaging in a way that’s not possible with SEO. Changing site titles and descriptions can be a major task and there’s very few SEO marketers who are going to recommend this on a regular basis given the risk of reduction in site rank and time needed for post-change analysis.
In contrast, through Paid ads we can update our Brand messaging within the space of a few minutes to make sure that we’re calling out the most relevant details for that point in time. Combined with the relevant extensions we’ve talked about earlier, this amplifies our presence and gives us another angle to reach our customers in a way that’s risk free for our SEO team.
With that said, there’s validity to the question of how efficient Brand ads are. The best approach is to test different levels of visibility and work out what’s most effective for you. In some cases, running at an Impression Share of 20-30% will help to save budget while ensuring enough visibility that competitors decide it’s not worth competitively bidding on your brand name. In other cases, you might need to keep your 100% Impression Share target and focus on other ways to improve cost efficiency through bid adjustments and negative keywords.
If your client decides to pause Brand ads completely, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on analytics tools to measure the uplift in traffic and conversion volume. The best case scenario is that Organic picks up the slack but, more likely, there will be a 10-20% gap where competitors are stealing clicks that they wouldn’t have got previously. If this happens, use the data to make a case for why Brand should remain part of the account and look at how this can run most efficiently.
For smarter Brand Paid Search, get in touch.