I’ve worked in a few places now and have touched upon PPC campaigns a fair few times. For the most part a properly formatted and managed PPC campaign can bring lots to the table, validating keywords, quickly determining ROI and exploring opportunities however one particular aspect of PPC does nothing except waste money and skew results in favour of a PPC campaign.
What is this oh so annoying practice?
Brand Terms
Organic SEO can quickly and easily dominate brand term searches which once established I can pretty much guarantee will remain stable. My beef is that PPC companies often add these terms into their campaigns which appear above the organic results usually containing one or more references to the clients branded product page (and in some cases dominated by the brand content). This means that the client is paying for clicks through this link when theres a free one (or more) available just below. Not only is this costing clients loads but it also skews the metrics often quoted by PPC companies, increasing campaign conversion rates and adding an element of smoke and mirrors to the whole process.
Granted in some cases when a competitor is bidding against your brand term you may need a PPC entry… but only for selected phrases.
My advce is to ask your PPC company to split brand and non brand terms in their reports and focus on whats converting for non brnd terms. Also to validate the brand term list against organic results on a regular basis to both pick up where a competitor has inserted an ad, and to trim out the fat of PPC ads where none are required.
What about a retailer selling multiple branded products? Why would you not use those terms for PPC? If I stock 30+ brands I wouldn’t dominate natural search for all those keywords/terms and variations. PPC would be a key aspect to getting as new brand on board and seeing results instantly.
Are you talking about a situation where its the companies own branded products (the manufacturer), then yes I would agree and generally Paid Search Companies do this all the time to fudge figures when they’re not performing.
They generally fail to see the bigger picture that they can still explain to the client that a customer searching for their own branded products will more than likely of found them in the 1st place through an AdWords ad if this is there main marketing method.
This is intended for bigger brands with little or no competition for their main branded terms.
Brand terms are one of the most abused areas, more smoke and mirrors happen here than in any other aspect of PPC.
We’ve also been seeing an increasing trend of “PPC performance marketing” which seems to focus quite heavily on brand activity and whilst sounding good to a merchant it is actually quite the reverse for most.
We are a PPC agency and a client of ours (with a fairly high brand to generic ratio as they sit in-between some big channels so are found more by brand than product as their competitors are so strong) migrated to a performance marketing agency after a glitzy pitch with promises of more clicks (no mention of sales though, and the click volume they touted totalled more than the current impression volume for the keywords!!), we pointed this out but the client decided to give them a go, fast forward a few months and the “performance” agency had skewed the client’s traffic from 66% brand v organic to 87% brand and dropped the campaigns that made the client money but not them.
The cost per sale increased from £1.02 to £2.52 with 87% of the sales coming from brand, only 13% of sales were generic in origin, compared to previously 34% generic, needless to say after we analysed the figures with them they ditched the “performance” agency.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen, the way these performance agencies work is very much like being affiliates, they paint a no risk venture of “no sales no fees” yet focus only on the volume keywords, ignoring the long tail generic and even in many cases brand + generic search terms so as to just just maximise sales volume for money spent and whilst that’s a dream approach for an affiliate to work to it’s not if it’s your sole in-house ppc channel as many lucrative sales for the merchant are missed due to it not being profitable enough for the agency so it’s just not a healthy approach for most merchants to adopt.
Brand ppc can be a useful addition but it depends on a few factors such as competitor activity, product range, natural listings etc. but it does need to monitored closely to ensure it’s adding value and not merely getting in the way of traffic already heading to the merchant’s site and adding extra expense in the process.
Good PPC should be a process.. not an event!.. constantly evolving whilst being assessed to ensure value is being added.
Thanks for the extensive feedback dude.