Omniture Articles
“Buying�? Your Brand On Search – Up To 23% Revenue Lift!
Should you buy your own brand in PPC? The short answer is yes – and it may be worth as much as 24% higher revenue per visit.
We know the current skepticism from the search and ecommerce shows: "If my brand appears at the top of organic listings for searches that include branded keywords, why should I spend the money on buying PPC ads for those keywords?"
The truth is, we tried it, we measured it, and we have the results to show for it. Not only can brand keyword ads pay for their own costs, but they can also contribute to significant increase in both customer propensity to buy and in revenue.
And, it makes sense. A purchase is never an isolated activity, and the presence of brand reinforcement on highly relevant search in the natural and paid areas of search results pages can help influence propensity to buy.
Can't We Just Skip the Ads?
Our partner in the test, a major online retailer, was spending several thousand dollars a day on PPC ads for its brand name. The company wondered: Wouldn't it make sense to save the money or funnel it into other channels, especially as Google seems to continually be striving to improve organic search results?
Several points seemed to argue against the continuing use of branded keyword ads:
- There's no competition for the brand name keyword ad, so the company was at the mercy of the search engine when it came to price.
- No other ad besides the company's appeared. Without the ad, the company would still appear at the top of the page, in the organic listings.
- Google had begun adding four subcategories below the organic listing that took prospects even more deeply into the site. Wouldn't that detail help drive at least as much traffic as a PPC ad? (See Best Buy example below.)
- Because of the above arguments, wasn't it likely that the same traffic would end up at the site and behave in the same way whether the ads were present or not?
On the other side of the argument, of course, is the fact that brand keyword ads were drawing large amounts of traffic to the site. Too, if the company's competitor was allowed at some point to purchase our client's branded keywords, it would leave our client open to the possibility that the competition's ad could get the top slot on the page. (This is, in actuality, unlikely, Jonathan Mendez of the blog
Optimize & Prophesize points out. A competitor's quality score – the number that is derived from a combination of keyword, landing page and clickthrough rate – would probably keep a competitor's search ad using your brand name from snaring a top sponsorship slot.)
All of these were good arguments. However, if we've learned nothing else in our work here at Offermatica, we've learned that guessing can get marketers into trouble. Our best instinct, even when coupled with years of experience, is often wrong. So we decided to test the theories.
The Test
Working with the retailer and
OTTO Digital (Offermatica's sister company), we identified 30 branded keywords. Then, over the course of two weeks, we tracked those keywords, with ads turned on one week and no ads the next.
There was no issue of seasonality for the time period during which the campaign was running, and traffic numbers across the two weeks was stable.
Across Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the keywords generated 47,078 visitors to the site when the ads were present, and 48,582 visitors when the ads were not present.
Results
Our client was thrilled to learn that conversions across all search engines were higher by 22.98 percent when the brand name keyword ads were present. Better yet, revenue per visitor was higher by nearly 21.94 percent when the ads were present.
So, although the number of visitors was slightly lower when the ads were present (by just over 1500 visitors), conversions and RPV were high enough with the keyword ads present to not only justify their spend but also to drive a big chunk of incremental revenue.
In other words, the ads did not drive more traffic. But they did drive more traffic that resulted in a purchase.
More Interesting Results
Another result that should interest marketers is that the category sub-links under the main natural result had a lower conversion rate than the main link.
Sample of category sub-links:
"Should I continue to buy brand names when my company appears at the top of organic listings?" is not a no-brainer. The results in this case were counter-intuitive: it makes intuitive sense that visitors clicking on the first organic listings – when no ads are above it – should draw behavior consistent with people who click on an ad, when it is the first ad.
Instead, those clicking on the ad had far better conversion rates than those who clicked on the organic listing.
Our client would have lost quite a bit of revenue had it chosen to forego the purchase of those brand name ads.
The fact is, any question that we choose to ask about the behavior of our visitors can have counter-intuitive answers. Any change we choose to make can have unexpected repercussions. That's why testing is so exciting – and so important.
Only when we test our hypotheses can we be certain we're not leaving money on the table. And, only in this way can we guarantee that each step we take is moving us forward in our drive to offer customers the best experience possible.
