PPC Brand Personality Disorder: How to Deal with Big Brands in Paid Search

Brand keywords have caused me to think. A lot.

For each client there is clearly a different "right" approach regarding how to use the brand name when frolicking through the land of paid search.

Your first response to this is, predictably, "Yea...and...?", or more descriptively, "isn't that the point of being paid for this? To think about the strategy?"

Yes and yes.

But that doesn't mean I can't write blog posts about it to find different ways to circumvent this whole "thinking" process. Then we can all spend more time on more important things like...facebooking...or whatever the kids do nowadays.

There are a plethora of important reasons why you should be using brand terms in your paid search. These keywords can obviously explain a lot about brand awareness (the "awareness gauge") and they can send extremely valuable and inexpensive traffic with users at the tail end of the purchasing cycle (depending on your goals), plus the added benefit of being able to see just how many people misspell (read: mangle) the most innocuous of company names for the sake of search.

However, branded terms can also be somewhat enigmatic. And the question remains, are the branded terms that you are using really helping your results? if so, how much? Again, it depends on your goals and your client.

In the next few posts I'll try to neatly package the ways that I've used branded terms by profiling the different types of brands you may end up dealing with, and the helpful tactics that I have seen.

Brand Personality: The Kleenex

Everyone knows your name; you are synonymous with the general product you represent (Kleenex = Tissue). When others somewhat resemble you, you often hear things like "OMG, you remind me so much of the Kleenex!", or, "Did the Kleenex get a hair cut?", or even, "Yo! It's Kleenex!".

The Kleenex's goal is most likely not to build on existing popularity, but to make sure everyone knows it is still there and is still the sh*t, sometimes by buying new shoes and showing them off. Some call this "defensive marketing" which, for ubiquitous brand names, means it is not about getting to the top, but more about staying on top while others chuck grenades at your text ads.

Here are the problems with being the Kleenex: Everyone knows you (good), which means there are a lot of people riding your coattails to success and potentially driving up your costs (not good). This also means that everyone tries to be like you, so you can end up blending in with the crowd if you're not careful, especially in search results. Furthermore, you are an easy target for undercutting, and people saying that they are the better version of you.

If you are the Kleenex, here are ways to make sure you are getting the best results out of your paid search:

1. You must always remind people that you are the real deal. Make it a priority to be at the top of the page. It seems obvious aloud, but how often do you actually look at the daily positions for your branded terms? Sure, your quality score should be handing you the top positioning on a platter (a delicious, delicious platter), but don't look away - that position is coveted by the little guys who just want a piece of you and/or want to steal your squeeze. They should be willing to bid the big bucks to get above you, since capturing the users at this time in the purchasing cycle is a rare thing.

Ways to remind the searching audience of your awesomeness:

• Long story short: Bid more. If your name is penetrating enough to fall into the Kleenex personality type, you have the money to spare. Besides, the clicks for these searches generally cost less anyways. If you're just starting out with the campaign and you're missing the results history desired for top billing, you might want to bid heavier at first to secure that spot and high CTR before dropping CPC.
• Use "Official Site" in your ads and constantly place your brand name or product name (depending on the search terms) into the ad copy and headline.
• Be sure that your quality scores are as high as high can be for your branded keywords. This means placing your brand name in the headlines of ads and ensuring that the ad text is as relevant as possible to the keyword (duh). This could also mean splitting up your Company/Brand/Product terms into multiple ad groups for categorization and ease of matching ad messages to searches.
• Test the registered trademark symbol in your ads next to your brand/products and measure any results on CTR.
• Use position preferences if your average position is not at the top. You might want to just test this one out for a few days, since it will not just put you in top positions for each, it will just not show you in poor positions. You should only use this tool if you believe that appearing low in results will either adversly affect your brand name or will bring down your CTR, in which case you might take a hit in quality score or CPC.
• Also, most search engines have trademark laws that should be adhered to across the board. Make a competitive sweep once a month just to make sure ads aren't using your name and/or products in ads. If so, file a complaint with the search engine to remove your name from competitors' ads. To deflect this potential up front, you might want to check with the search engines and make sure your trademarked name is registered with the network so competitors will be thwarted when writing their malevolent ads.
• NEW UPDATE: Use Google Sitelinks if you can. This will give your branded ads additional real estate and will allow you to link to multiple pages from one ad. Huge advantage for big brands.

Reminding the user that you are "the one and only Kleenex", and that all others bow down to you, lends an incredible amount of credibility and plants the seed of doubt about all of those posers on the page.


2. Cover misspellings with their own ad group. You'd be amazed at the number of ways people can misspell your famous name. Clean-ex, kleen ex, cleanix, chleanox...the list is infinite. Again, you do not want competitors stealing your thunder, so missing out on a few of these terms could add up and could make you lose out on many customers.

• Check out the search query report if you are using Google Adwords, look into the most popular organic searches in your analytics program, or check out review sites where people comment on your product (and make sure they are saying nice things!).
• Moreover, setting the misspellings aside in their own ad group will help you keep track of which misspellings are happening the most. Knowing this, you may want to gear some ads specifically to these misspellings, or even throw in very prevalent misspellings strategically on your website to help with quality score and SEO.

3. Give brand terms a separate budget by making them a new campaign. This could be a big one. It depends on what your users are using your brand name for, and it could be troublesome if your targeting/strategy gets hairy. It could also pay off.

For example, if you are a bank, or any website in which users constantly return to sign in, how much of your paid search budget should be used up by these users coming in through text ads?

If you are sending users to a site where customers log in, here are a few approaches:

• Limit budget, but don't get rid of branded terms entirely. You do not want to completely abandon these keywords since many users may want sign up instead of sign in. All you have to do is put thought into what types of users you are willing to pay for, and what they are searching on (so simple yet so effective!).
• If you are truly concerned about this, add negative keywords such as "login", "signin", "existing user", or "customer", but make sure you are the #1 organic search result for these searches.
• On the same note, look into excluding terms that deal with customer service, troubleshooting, etc. If you are not a company that focuses a lot of effort on these items, the users coming to complain or troubleshoot your product can use organic, no use paying for it.

On the other hand, if your brand terms are the most efficient and effective way that users not only get to your site but also end up converting, you don't want the more expensive broad terms eating up your whole budget while the branded terms are left in the dust, do you?! For this reason, test the brand search budget ceiling for these branded terms by tinkering with the budget for about a week or two, and come up with a figure that allows these keywords to fly free. Not only will this drive down CPCs (which the client loves!) but it will also increase overall clicks, conversion rate, and CPA (which the client also loves! Good times).

The bottom line is this: Branded terms are very inexpensive and can be invaluable, especially if you use them correctly. In most cases, it is not worth it to leave your brand and product names out of the campaign, if only because they cost next to nothing. For the "big gun" brands such as our friend the Kleenex, defensive marketing tactics are a necessity in the online search environment, since everyone wants your position and customers!

Constantly remind searchers of just how important you are ("kind of a big deal") and why your official-ness is more awesome than being a brand freeloader.

Stay tuned for the next post, Brand Personality: The Anklebiter.