Unlocking ROI in Paid Search | When to Invest in Brand Campaigns

‘Why pay for clicks we were going to get anyway?’ is the standard concern from clients who already have a strong brand presence on the search results page. On the surface, it seems reasonable, especially when budgets are tight.

For most clients, we’re firm that a strong brand campaign should remain an always-on part of their paid search strategy. The thinking behind this advice is a little more nuanced than you might think.

When I talk about brand campaigns in paid search, I’m referring to the ads that appear when someone searches for keywords specific to your brand name. 

For example, if you head to Google and search for “Rocket Agency” you’ll see a paid ad at the top of the page.

Firstly, your ad will appear towards the top of the page. Study after study shows that appearing first is a massive advantage when it comes to conversions. So even if your brand also appears further down the page in the organic search results (and it almost certainly will), you’ll gain an additional advantage by being the first thing the viewer sees.

Secondly, a correctly configured ad takes up a lot of screen real estate. The further people have to scroll, the less chance there is they will bother. Also, a big ad will take attention away from any smaller results above or below. 

Thirdly, the content and the destination URLs of the ad can be heavily controlled. This allows you to control the message and the user experience in valuable ways.

For most clients and ourselves, a brand campaign is the last thing we’d turn off if media budgets dropped to (almost) nothing.

There’s no hiding from this. 

Brand campaigns are easier to run than non-brand campaigns, and they almost always perform better. Typically, the average brand campaign performs twice as well as non-branded search campaigns, and we’ve seen plenty of examples where the returns are significantly better than this.

This excellent performance will cannibalise a certain percentage of the conversions your organic, social and other search results would have otherwise captured.

This means that if your search campaigns are run by a different agency or team than your SEO campaign, expect some pushback as their very best traffic source is heavily impacted, and they have to work harder (with poorer quality traffic) to maintain performance.

Rather than worrying about whether a brand campaign is making your agency look better than they are, or cannibalising existing conversions, the real question should be - what would happen if you didn’t run brand campaigns at all? 

Would your overall marketing efforts be better or worse off?

Would your organic and social search results capture all possible clicks, and convert in the same way as the ad, or would some of your brand traffic head elsewhere (competitors, information sites etc) or simply disappear?

In understanding why you might be worse off without brand campaigns, it’s important to understand that as marketers we tend to overestimate the importance and recall of our brands in the minds of our audience. 

For most products or services, our customers fall well short of having perfect knowledge or even awareness of the options available to them. Part of the buying process is getting comfortable with their options and figuring out what’s best for them.

The reality is that except perhaps for very loyal existing customers, and some of those at the very end of their buying journey who have already decided to do business with you, the vast majority of people searching for your brand are susceptible to being influenced by messages from your competitors or even more likely, simply losing interest in doing anything.

In many cases, they have zero loyalty to your brand. 

Review your search history and think about what the brands you’ve searched for previously actually meant to you. Do you know each brand well? Did you ultimately purchase from them or a competitor? Or did you end up doing nothing?

There is every chance a person who has searched for your brand doesn’t know a lot about you, is not committed to ever purchasing from you and that you are one of a number of brands they intend to search for. A person searching for you is absolutely not a sign that you’ve won their business and you should never assume they’ll ignore competitors or do slightly hard things (like scrolling) to find the perfect search result to see you in your best light. For the most part, you’re just not that important to them. And that includes people who have visited your website or even purchased from you before. Again, don’t believe me? Check your own search and purchase history. 

We see lifts in brand search for Rocket when we run webinars, when we release a new podcast, when we’re running display or social ads, when we send emails to our database or a partner mentions us in an email they send. We know that the vast majority of brand searches for Rocket are from people not yet committed to working with us. They are somewhere on their buyer journey, and more often at the start than at the end.

My point is not that brand traffic is not valuable, quiet the opposite. My point is that you should never assume your marketing has succeeded just because someone searched for you. You still have a lot of work to do to make them a customer.

This is a scenario where you have no choice but to run a brand campaign. By understanding the context of brand searches above, you can predict what will happen if a competitor ad appears at the top of the page when they search for you. You will lose a percentage of this high-performing traffic to that competitor.

Having your ad not just appear, but appear at the top of all searches matters. 

In the example below, you see what a search for ‘Origin Energy’ would have looked like if they were not bidding on their own brand. A customer who wanted to sign up with an energy company, and knew of Origin Energy, or was even slightly leaning towards using them, but was not at the very final stage of their buyer journey would most likely click on the ads for AGL to make sure they were making the right choice.

By bidding on their brand name and serving an ad that uses a good amount of screen real estate, their chances of being clicked on increase dramatically.

Do a search for your brand name in Google. Do you dominate the page? Are there very few options for someone to click on that won’t see them learning more about you? In particular positive things?

The answer should always be ‘yes’. It limits the chance of people clicking away from your brand, reduces the risk of them doing nothing, and it also helps build credibility in your brand.

A brand ad, with lots of extensions turned on, is a fast and relatively inexpensive way of dominating this critical page, even if competitors are not currently bidding on your brand.

The result of a strong brand campaign is often an improved click-through rate overall. 

We’ve done experiments with clients who didn’t see the value of brand campaigns and found that even when they dominate the first page results, and even when no competitors are bidding on their brand keywords, the total number of clicks to their site drops when they turn off their brand campaign. 

That’s right, the extra impact of an effective brand campaign can literally be the difference between someone reaching your website or not. Even when you’re not dealing with competitors and you already dominate the search results page.

Without a brand campaign, you’re leaving a fair bit to chance. Aside from worrying about a competitor taking the top spot from you with their own search ad, you should also think about (and test) which organic, social, video or other search result your potential customer is able to click on. Are there organic search results from competitors, aggregators or other third-party sites? There normally are and clicking on many of the above options (even your own social media pages) are likely to result in fewer real-world conversions for you compared to taking someone to the landing page of your choice.

The point is - never assume it’ll be your homepage someone clicks on, even if it’s the first search result. 

You see where I’m going? It’s not just about making sure you get the click. One of the huge benefits of a brand ad is that you get to carefully control not only the message in the search engine results page, but you also get to control the experience they receive after they click.

My last point, if you’re not swayed by the above, is to think of a brand campaign as an insurance policy against the risk of losing any part of the high-value traffic brand search represents.

The value of the asset you're trying to protect is the sum of all the time and money your brand invested to trigger someone to search for you.

Getting someone to Google your company name is actually pretty hard. Your audience is busy and distracted and the reality that is for the most part, they just don’t care about you or other brands. You are a very small thing to them and you’re very easily forgotten.

If you decide against running a brand campaign, and the result is that a portion of the valuable people who search for you don’t arrive on your site, will the modest savings (brand campaigns are relatively cheap) make financial sense, given how much you invested to get them to remember your name and search for you in the first place?

There are plenty of nuances in paid search, and indeed in all areas of digital marketing.