The Power Of Branded Search And Then Some

There are two important strategic concepts in paid search aka PPC (pay-per-click). 1) Branded Search and 2) Non-Branded Search. It is easy to give a brand search campaign 2nd priority but a good brand strategy can give you a good ROAS (return-on-advertising-spend) and improve your overall monthly revenue. In this blog, we are going to explore some brand search strategic concepts to make your brand campaign more powerful.

Brand search strategy entails to bid on your own branded keywords. The keywords can include your company name or the products that you offer. When a person is searching for your specific brand name or your products, your search ad should show on top of the SERP (search engine results page) if your campaign is set up correctly. There are several reasons for this. One reason is to protect your brand from your competitors. Why? Well, because your competitors can bid on your branded keywords and therefore knock you further down the SERP. We don’t want that. Valuable traffic could go to your competitors’ sites instead. Another important reason is that branded search is extremely high-intent and your brand campaign can help drive lower-funnel intent towards purchase. Now, we do want that! Finally, the clicks on your own branded keywords should have a lower CPC (cost-per-click), a lower CPL (cost-per-lead), and a healthy ROAS. In regards to your overall search budget, a brand campaign should be fairly inexpensive if done correctly. 

This is where most digital marketers stop but there is actually more to branded search campaign strategy. Brand campaigns can have a high conversion rate and we want to capitalize on this. We recommend creating more ad groups within the brand search campaign. This concept can create a funnel and assist your business to win additional high-intent users and optimize for conversions. Let’s take a look at this:

Within the brand campaign, you can create an ad group that can capture traffic from searchers who are conducting competitive research. This strategy can put your brand into the “consideration set” and help drive high-intent traffic to your site for additional valuable conversions. We are going to look at online dating for this exercise. If your brand’s niche is international dating, for example, you can bid on search terms (after doing keyword research of course) such as “best international dating sites”, “compare international dating sites”, or “review international dating sites”. We named this ad group “Competitive Research Search Intent”.

Another part of the funnel strategy is competitive conquesting. This means you are bidding on your competitors’ branded keywords to steal traffic in an attempt to drive high-intent traffic to your site instead. Continuing with the online dating vertical exercise, you will want to add customer-centric search terms to your negative keyword list. Negative keywords are search terms you do NOT want to be found for. In regards to online dating, if one of your competitors is match.com, you want to add search terms like “match.com log in” or “match.com customer service number” to your negative keyword list. They’ll waste your media spend and have a low ROAS. However, you need to watch this strategy very carefully as to not start a bidding war that can increase your CPC quite a bit. It all depends on your business’ goals. Also, you must follow certain rules like not using a competitor’s brand name in your ad copy. This can violate trademark law and get you into trouble. We don’t want that! 

Lastly, another strategy in a brand campaign you can adapt is competitor customer churn search. What does “churn” mean? The churn rate equals customers who want to leave. So, again, if your competitor is match.com, you can bid on keywords like “cancel match.com membership” or “cancel my match.com subscription”, etc. This could be a powerful way for your brand to enter the consideration phase and capture quality leads. 

As you can see there is more to brand search strategy than just bidding on your own branded keywords. If you have any other strategy insights we’d love to hear from you. Comment on this blog or just drop us line. If your business needs any assistance with a good paid search strategy, contact us here. For now, stay safe out there and hopefully, we’ll get over this election stress soon. Be well. Cheers!