Your Brand and Paid Search: What You Need to Know
Chief marketers using paid and natural search engine marketing often ask, “If we rank well in the natural search results for the brand name, should my search team also buy my brand terms in paid search?”
Although a fair question, the answer is not as straightforward as it might seem. Think about these tactical and strategic considerations when weighing the value of paid search clicks on brand-name keywords.
Tactical considerations
Do other advertisers show up on your brand searches? Some marketers with unique, unambiguous brand names do not have resellers, affiliates, or competitors bidding on their brand terms. Others find, despite taking appropriate trademark protection measures at the search engines, that they must address the issue of other advertisers bidding on their brand and appearing in brand-name listings. Manufacturers or suppliers, for instance, often have legitimate resellers, affiliates, and channel partners buying their brand names. For large retailers, eBay or comparison-shopping sites may show up.
With recent enhancements to its “quality score” relevancy model, Google has cleared away many of these ads from brand searches, but other engines still frequently display multiple advertisers. If you face direct competition on your brand-name keywords, you will most likely benefit from maintaining a paid search presence on these keywords.
Even without competition in paid listings, other traffic and distribution considerations exist. How well does your natural search listing represent your brand? Does it rank first on each engine? Are the title and the description informative and in your brand voice? Are there other less favorable sites, negative reviews or PR, or even competitors prominently listed in the natural results? If any of these factors are less than ideal, you need to strongly consider how a well-written paid search ad can improve the situation.
Also remember that a lot of paid search clicks come from sites other than the engine’s or portal’s primary search site. Google AdWords listings reach other search sites ranging from AOL to Web search pages on NYTimes.com and even to domain parking sites. Yahoo! similarly distributes its paid search ads to a large network of search sites.
The amount of traffic coming from these nonengine pages varies greatly by keyword, but this traffic may not be directly replaceable with natural search. Be sure to quantify the volume and quality of this source of paid search clicks when evaluating the benefits of paid search brand clicks.
Consider a complementary paid search strategy
Think about the thousands of people who search for a popular brand name such as “L.L. Bean” or “Kohl’s” in a given day. They do not all think the same, so why should natural and paid search ads all look the same?
This simple insight suggests a segmentation strategy: Segment online and local/offline audiences by clearly differentiating the messaging in your paid and your natural listings. Give users a specific reason to choose one listing over another.
For instance, for consumers simply seeking your Website with a navigational or general intent, consider adding the “.com” form of your brand to the title of your home page. This will subtly differentiate the natural search listing as the best way to get to your online destination.
Next, satisfy other searchers’ more-specific expectations with well-crafted paid search listings. Multichannel merchants with multiple store locations, for example, should consider running ads catering to local shopping intent. Instead of the “Brand – Official Site” ad that often runs in parallel with a mirror-image natural listing, attract locally oriented searchers with a “Brand – Stores Near You” ad linking directly to a store finder page. Or better yet, create individually geo-targeted ads for each major store location with specific location words in the title (“Brand – Chicago locations”), the display URL (www.brand.com/Chicago), and ad copy that highlights local specials, store hours, or phone numbers. The ad will practically leap off the page to embrace users seeking this information, creating a strong sense of a brand by anticipating their needs and going the extra mile to connect with them.
This strategy can also reduce overall spend on paid search clicks by shifting purely navigational clicks to the natural search listing.
You and your search team can embrace this approach to better engage consumers, improve your program’s cost-effectiveness, and gain a leg up on the competition. Don’t shortchange your brand by simply considering how much you might save in click costs by relying solely on natural search clicks. Instead, decide on the best combination of ad messages and landing pages to directly engage a wide range of searchers with potentially vastly different intentions.
Cam Balzer is vice president of strategic planning at DoubleClick (www.performics.com) and a monthly contributor to CHIEF MARKETER. Contact him at [email protected].
Other articles by Cam Balzer:
How to Champion Natural Search Optimization
Search in 2007: The Year of Integration
Search Engine Marketing Does More Than Ever This Holiday Season
Quantifying Online Search’s Impact on Offline Demand
Listen to the Data: Using Search to Understand Your Market
