5 reasons to pay for branded keywords

Eduardo Llach
Search Posted on February 26, 2008

Five tips: branded keyword optimization techniques
Because statistics show that more conversions come from branded terms, it makes good business sense to optimize those branded campaigns as much as possible. Below are some of the techniques we use:

1. Optimize your ad targeting to get traffic where you can get better CTR & conversion rates.This means running granular campaigns, taking advantage of the targeting capabilities that ad networks provide. Targeting includes: geographic, location, day of week, time of day, demographic and more. Our search data indicate that campaigns using such targeting enjoy substantial performance lift compared to a campaign that does not. 

2. Optimize your creatives to increase the CTR and land the user on the highest converting, most relevant landing page. By running various creative and landing page combinations you will discover which creative performs best and which landing page is the best compliment. For the creatives you should:

  • Have a strong offer (Buy one get one free, free trial)
  • Use "Best of…" if you have third-party endorsements
  • Say Official Site if you have affiliates or competitors for your brand name
  • Vary the creatives over time
  • Find the most popular product or service to pitch

3. Optimize your landing pages, making sure you have a close coupling of ad creative messaging and landing page content. Google's quality score essentially enforces this concept to ensure the user has a positive experience from click to destination.   

4. Keep your affiliates off your branded keywords. We recommend:

  • Clearly outlining search marketing in the affiliate program rules
  • Monitoring twice a week
  • Pulling affiliates that do not comply
  • Giving them a good Cost Per Acquisition offer, but no branded terms

5. Use technology. You can implement many of the techniques described above manually but it can be challenging. There are advanced technology tools available, which will help you be more successful in less time.

From our experience, we highly recommend bidding on branded keywords. Use the comment section below to share your own experiences, successes and challenges with running branded campaigns.

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Eduardo Llach is CMO and co-founder, SearchRev. Read full bio.

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Comments

Eduardo Llach
Eduardo Llach February 26, 2008 at 12:17 PM

Response to John Kaduwanema: How should a small business manage a branded PPC campaign on a small budget?

Great question. The good news is that if you are a small LOCAL business, you can run a branded term (i.e. product names, company names) campaign that is targeted to your region. You can specify a city, a state or a region (Google uses regions like 'San Francisco Bay Area'). You can also add a city / region to your keywords. I'm in Palo Alto, so if I type in 'web development Palo Alto' I see Palo Alto specific ads.

The budget for these local campaigns will be much lower and the conversion rates should be higher.

If you are a small business servicing the nation you could choose local campaigns in your top 5 or 10 regions.

John Kaduwanema
John Kaduwanema February 26, 2008 at 8:25 AM

But what do you do if you are just a small brand without the prescence? What if the costs are not covered by the revenue or if you do not have the expertise/resources to run an effective ppc campaign? I think this five points are excellent but may have limited application to small businesses.