STEPP-Digital- Ayurveda-practitioner-interview
Exclusive Q & A with Sri-Lanka’s leading Ayurveda Practitioner
February 3, 2017
PPC-Branded-terms

 

Quality PPC Management comes with multiple tests & learnings as few would argue there’s a recipe that fits all in the same way. 

Using pay-per-click to boost your site traffic and turn quality leads into converters follows a string of actions planned and executed well in advance against the brand’s set KPIs and its own definition of who the quality leads are and how converting actions/goals are defined. Planning, planning and again planning before you’d execute the exciting part – audience set up, keyword or product list tactics before starting to adjust the perpetually agile and auction-‘fussy’ bids.

However, almost every new account keyword list would find before the upload a classic dilemma: should you or should you not include your brand terms in to bid on?

There’re multiple schools of thought out there on this perennial topic and while it should by all means be approached on a case-by-case scenario, few ‘pro’ arguments are worth considering before taking the final first shout:

  1. Bidding on branded queries helps you dominate your search engine results page – granted.

    You’d be pushing down your competitor’s, 3rd party partner listings (if there’re any). By appearing in both the organic and paid ads columns, you are proving to your searcher that you are a prominent player in your space.  
  2. Capture high-quality leads that are near the point of conversion.  It’s your chance to tailor the messaging per audience as you’d see fit: you can do this by gender (DFSAs – demographic targeting for search ads), age, household income and even parenting status. What’s more is that a branded ad copy listing you can link to a dedicated landing page: imagine how useful is this for a retailer that sells different products to men and women? Your landing pages can save your searchers time and push them closer to the purchase funnel! 

  3. You can re-target your brand searchers based on their prior buying or browsing behaviour

    and like-wise be very tactical about reaching out to your past converters as you would to your non-converters. PPC branded ads give you a chance to convince them to shop again or – if they haven’t yet – convince them to do that by offering a limited-time gain or a referral benefit to bring you more like-minded interested leads!

Meanwhile if you’re a brand who’s at a stage when incremental traffic gained via organic search listings is far more convincing to keep your brand PPC ads at bay and you don’t have any other players bidding on your branded terms you might want to run a test during a quieter non-promotional period to assess the benefit of having both PPC & organic listings running in full swing.

More of this I’ve shared with SEMRush this year following the speaker event where I was invited as lead speaker at the PPC Conference held by BrightonSEO :

If your brand is well known both offline and online, organically, bidding on own brand terms might be found debatable. However, if your brand depends on generating demand, non-brand PPC & SEO would need to go hand in hand across the funnel. Here success metrics should differ per stage of the funnel: i.e., upper-funnel success metrics should be different from lower-funnel performance achievements.