the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

I don’t know why this topic gets me so fired up, but it does. This morning I was reading a new article over at SEL that argued against focusing on PPC ads for brand searches, by a PPC analyst of all people.

The general position of the author was that brand searches don’t drive incremental sales, and therefore shouldn’t be the focus of your PPC team.

Sales from brand phrases are non-incremental, and don’t reflect the effort of the search team.

To me, this is a totally irrelevant argument. It’s akin to Best Buy telling their newpaper reps that they only want their Sunday inserts to show up in markets where no one has ever heard of Best Buy. Sure, that’s a very useful ad, but I still want my inserts to show up where people have heard of me, and perhaps they even look forward to the Sunday inserts so they can browse the new plasma flatscreens or mp3 players (I know I do).

Let me put it this way. I know for a fact that I will be buying a flat screen sometime in the next month or two. The day I plan on purchasing this TV, I will probably pick up the Best Buy insert, as well as the ABT ad, and the Circuit City insert, and I will compare prices among those 3 retailers. If Best Buy doesn’t place an insert that day, they are out of luck (pretending there’s no internet for a moment).

Paid search is a similar playing field. When a user searches for brands, it’s because they want to see what the vendor has to offer, and it indicates a predisposition to a purchase. To me, this is a prime prospect, and I definitely will craft a finely targeted campaign for this person. Now this is where clients always object:

“I already rank for my own brand/name, why would I pay ‘extra’ for that click?”. Brand searches are an opportunity to:

1. Reinforce your brand
2. Inform users of new sales, products, or special offers
3. Deliver a more customized message that can’t be controlled through serp descriptions as well
4. Ward off competition who may be bidding on your brand
5. Control the dialogue

Now, this is not to say that there should be no special consideration for a brand search. Far from it, in fact. Every campaign I build has separate brand adgroups as well as a name adgroup, as a matter of default strategy. I will value a brand sale very differently, and the CPA will likely be significantly different than a non-brand sale. The messaging is different, the call to action is different, and landing page may be different as well. A brand searcher is just a segment of your audience, and they should be treated as such, not ignored becuase you have a decent organic ranking.

For small to medium sized businesses brand searches are even more important. Your site may be new, or have low visibility in general, but there are still a handful of people searching your name or brand, and you want to be in front of them, even if it means paying a few cents extra for a click. Last month I had a small regional client spend $5.16, at $.07 per click, on branding terms, most of them generated by searches for the company name. They do rank for their name, but other companies bid on this as well, and would show up on top of their organic listing if not for our PPC ad. That $5.16 drove over $2,000 in sales. Would those sales have come organically? Maybe, or maybe not. Maybe someone would have been diverted by another PPC ad. But now we know for sure, we drove the sale, the ROI was astounding, and the client is happy.

What’s the overall point? Brand searches are an opportunity. Whether sales from brand searches are incremental or not is irrelevant. They are sales, and should be measured in a separate adgroup as other segmented queries are.

Don’t miss the boat!