Maximizing Brand Impact: The Strategic Guide to Advertising on Your Own Keywords

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By Raghav Kansal | Founder and CEO | ETML

To Bid or Not to Bid: The Brand Keyword Advertising Dilemma

As a CMO or founder, you’ve likely encountered the question of whether to invest in advertising on brand keywords. The decision isn’t straightforward, as it involves balancing several factors. Here’s a deeper dive into the pros and cons, along with some strategic guidance.

Benefits of Advertising on Brand Keywords:

1. Protecting Brand Equity:
   • Advertising on your own brand keywords prevents competitors from capitalizing on your brand’s strength. By securing top ad positions, you safeguard your customer base from being poached by rivals.
2. Controlling the Customer Journey:
   • By advertising on brand keywords, you gain control over the messaging and experience users encounter. Customized ad copies and tailored landing pages ensure that your brand narrative remains consistent and compelling, which can significantly enhance conversion rates.
3. Data-Driven Insights:
   • Advertising on brand keywords provides a wealth of data. Because the traffic from these ads is highly targeted, any fluctuations in the conversion funnel can offer critical insights. This data is invaluable for monitoring the effectiveness of your sales funnel and can inform broader marketing strategies.
4. Driving Incremental Traffic:
   • Even with strong organic rankings, brand keyword ads can drive additional traffic. This is particularly important for capturing customers who might not engage with organic listings, thereby increasing your overall reach.

Drawbacks of Advertising on Brand Keywords:

1. Potentially Wasted Budget:
   • The main argument against advertising on brand keywords is the concern that it may be an unnecessary expense. If your organic listing already performs well, paying for clicks on your own brand can feel redundant, especially if these users would have clicked on your organic result anyway.

Strategic Recommendations:

• Minimum Investment Strategy:
  • Target 10% Impression Share:
    • At a minimum, aim for a 10% impression share. This level of investment ensures you don’t leave an open pass for competitors, or at the bare minimum limits it by making sure that they need to bid heavily to get impression share on your keywords, while allowing you to gather valuable data for monitoring your funnel. The focus here should be on minimizing spend and maximizing clicks within this range.
    • The right crisp objective to give to your performance team here is to minimize spends, maximize clicks while maintaining impressions share in range of 8-12%.

Finding the Optimal Balance:

The ideal strategy lies somewhere between these two extremes. Your approach should be tailored based on factors such as:

• The organic performance of your brand keywords
• Your overall marketing budget and objectives
• The strength and stickiness of your brand
• Industry trends, category loyalty, and seasonality

Test, Measure, and Optimize

To measure the incremental impact of brand keyword campaigns, you can implement a sequential on-off strategy over an 8-week period. While there are lot many nuances that one need to careful about, so that the results that this test shows are absolutely robust, it is good to give you some directional sense into whether you should aim for significant impression share and invest advertising dollars into brand keywords or not. Here’s how you can approach it:

Week-by-Week Breakdown:

1. Weeks 1-2: Brand Keywords ON
   • Objective: Establish a baseline for traffic, conversions, and sales when brand keyword ads are active.
   • Data to Capture:
     • Traffic and conversions attributed to brand keywords.
     • Overall organic traffic and sales.
2. Weeks 3-4: Brand Keywords OFF
   • Objective: Measure the drop (if any) in traffic and sales when brand keyword ads are paused.
   • Data to Capture:
     • Organic traffic and sales during the period.
     • Any noticeable change in overall traffic and conversions.
3. Weeks 5-6: Brand Keywords ON
   • Objective: Reintroduce brand keyword ads to observe any rebound in traffic and conversions.
   • Data to Capture:
     • Compare the data with Weeks 1-2 to check for consistency in performance when ads are turned on.
     • Analyze if the incrementality returns when the ads are back on.
4. Weeks 7-8: Brand Keywords OFF
   • Objective: Observe if the second pause in brand keyword ads shows similar patterns as Weeks 3-4.
   • Data to Capture:
     • Reassess the impact on organic traffic and sales.
     • Compare with previous “OFF” weeks to confirm trends.

Analysis:

• Traffic Analysis:
  • Compare the overall traffic in ON vs. OFF periods. This will help you understand how much traffic brand keyword ads are driving and if there is a significant drop during OFF periods.
• Sales Analysis:
  • Track sales during ON and OFF periods to see if the ads are driving incremental revenue. Analyze if the increase during ON periods is greater than any decrease during OFF periods.
• Incrementality Measurement:
  • By tracking the cost of ads and the corresponding increase in traffic/sales, you can assess the directional incrementality. Calculate the ROI during ON periods and compare it to the natural baseline observed during OFF periods.

This sequential testing method provides clear insights into the actual value of brand keyword ads and helps in making data-driven decisions about your ad spend.

Conclusions:

There’s no universal answer to whether you should advertise on brand keywords. A rigid stance—whether for or against—can be limiting. Instead, adopt a data-driven approach. Allow your performance team to test different strategies and measure the true incremental value of brand keyword advertising. This will enable you to find the optimal balance between cost efficiency and brand protection, ensuring your strategy aligns with your business goals.