In theory, having your ads appearing 100% the time and being the most prominent brand in the space sounds great. You’re visible to everyone who wants your services, competitors are being pushed down the search results page and you’re getting more conversions every week.
The question is, can you have too much of a good thing?
While there are major benefits to such comprehensive coverage there are also significant drawbacks and challenges that come with it. For every percentage point of visibility gained, CPC & spend dramatically increases as your campaigns work harder to dominate the market. There are a few global brands that can absorb this as just another line on the budget sheet but for everyday advertisers those costs can become unmanageable.
In this week’s post, we’ll look at some situations where 100% coverage is appropriate along with strategies to more efficiently work towards visibility when budgets are limited.
1) Branded Campaigns
For most advertisers, it makes sense to target 100% Impression Share on their own branded keywords. Unless your business name is a common word or shares a name with a much larger brand, working towards 100% Impression Share is usually the best approach. With CPCs so low for branded terms & high expected CTRs & conversion rates, even a large volume of branded traffic can make up a small fraction of total marketing spend.
Despite the relevance of brand campaigns working in your favour, there are still tactics that can be employed to reduce costs. Smart use of Exact Match & negative keywords will ensure that branded traffic is as relevant as possible while optimising towards Google’s recommendations will drive down CPC even further.
2) High Intent, Low Volume Keywords
Maximising visibility on generic keywords can quickly become expensive, even with the best optimisation possible happening within the campaigns. For many generic terms search volume is simply too high for advertisers to comfortably appear for all searches without quickly blowing through their budget.
Rather than competing for space on these terms, a visibility strategy focused on very specific high intent keywords can ensure that visibility is maximised along with the chances of a successful conversion. Sure, CPC will be higher for more specific keywords, but this is easily balanced out by the much lower search volume, leading to strong visibility on the most effective keywords for your goals.
3) Identifying The Point Of Efficiency
As with all marketing challenges, a test and learn strategy is your best friend when understanding how far to push visibility before it pushes back. Often, the increase in spend will outpace any increase in performance above 90% Impression Share and the smartest move is to pull back to the last point where the campaigns were performing to an acceptable level.
Taking a phased approach is the simplest path to success with steady, measured increases to visibility each week while keeping a close eye on your key performance metrics. Change won’t happen overnight and there will be a noticeable downward trend in efficiency as Impression Share and spend rises. By plotting this data over time, you’ll be able to identify the tipping point between visibility and performance and set targets to ensure campaigns are operating at peak efficiency.
4) Assign Audiences
Sometimes 100% visibility doesn’t mean reaching absolutely everyone. Effective use of remarketing and interest audiences can decrease the total pool of available impressions while also increasing relevance, leading to reduced costs and higher quality traffic through to your site.
This is particularly true for generic keywords that may have multiple meanings and intentions for any given search. Assigning audiences to your campaigns will ensure that keywords are only showing to users who have a demonstrated interest in your service, allowing you to narrow down your focus to a pool of users a fraction of the original size while driving better results for your campaigns. The most important thing here is remembering to set those audiences to targeting rather than observation to ensure you get the most out of this strategy.
For an ambitious business, more visibility is always a positive. The goal is to get that visibility in a way that’s efficient, cost effective and moves the business towards their goals. Whether it’s adjusting keyword types, doing data analysis to understand efficiency points or focusing in on audience targeting, thinking about maximum visibility in a different way is sure to lead to better results.
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