Search marketing is not just about direct response. With millions of daily keyword searches by engaged users, this is a terrific channel for branding exercises. The search engine pay-per-click model does however come with an inherent challenge; the click.
Yesterday I attended the IAB event dubbed “Search for Brands”. As the title suggested, it was all about how marketers could use the power of search to not just drive conversions, but also achieve their branding objectives.
Marketers that are approaching search engines for branding campaigns in the same way as display advertising will however quickly fail. While a display branding campaign most of the time is about reach and frequency of impressions, PPC marketing is still about the click. This is highlighted by the fact that click-through-rate is a majority factor of the so-called Quality Score which impacts position and actual cost-per-click.
What does that mean? Anyone looking to build a brand through PPC still needs to carefully consider their calls to action and having adverts backed up by a relevant landing page. This can be a tough challenge, and a good case study for this was Google’s trademark policy changes in May 2008:
Prior to May 5th 2008, UK advertisers could submit a request to have their trademarks protected to avoid competitors bidding against these terms and also use them in their ad copies. From this date however, Google now allows anyone to bid on previously restricted trademarks. The only edge that the trademark protection can provide is the use of the trademark in the ad copy (and even this protection is now being diluted further).
Many advertisers and agencies were preparing for the worst; that aggressive competitors would start to bid all over their trademarks and leach traffic from the brand awareness that they had been building up over the years. This did indeed happen to an extent. While many brands came up with “gentlemen’s” agreement to avoid bidding wars, others were keen to maximise this new opportunity. And in particularly challenger brands wanting to increase their awareness and market share.
However, due to the nature of the Quality Score, only competing advertisers that managed to connect extremely well with an audience that were actively searching for another brand and could lure them over (e.g. achieve a high CTR and ultimately conversion), were able to sustain the competitive bidding for more than a short period of time. The result was that after a few tumultuous weeks with a lot of brand monitoring, many campaigns reverted back to near normal levels of competion on pure brand terms.
In summary: whatever the objectives of the PPC campaign, it is still competing in a single auction and needs to qualify through quality as measured by that coveted click.
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