Tips for Buying Brand Keywords in Paid Search Advertising
August 17, 2007 by Susan Gunelius
Filed under Marketing
Online advertising is an everchanging animal, and it pays to hire an expert to help you develop your online marketing plan. However, if additional headcount is not in your current budget, it’s important to keep on top of paid search advertising trends to ensure you’re making the best investments.
Today, I found a post by Glenn Gabe on The Internet Marketing Driver that posed a question: If your website already has a strong presence and high ranking in organic searches, should you also invest in buying brand keywords to develop paid search traffic?
Glenn provides research results from a test conducted by Offermatica as well as his own personal test. Both tests generated similar results — an increase in traffic and conversions. Interestingly, adding brand keyword searches resulted in increased paid and organic search revenue.
In his post, Glenn recommends conducting your own test for a month or so to see if purchasing brand keywords will have similar results for your business. Sounds like it would be worth a try. A test would not be a significant investment but could bring in big rewards. He also provides a great list of factors to consider when evaluating whether to run a paid search for your brand (even if you already own the top spot in organic search). You can read Glenn’s full post here.
What do you think about paid search advertising? What role does it play in your overall online marketing plan?
Sounds like good advice to me (if not necessarily an original thought). Some people are hesitant to click on sponsored links, but seeing your URL twice might get them to click on your organic listing rather than some blogger’s post about your company.
On a related note, searches for your brand are frequently done by very qualified leads. Now, your organic listing is usually comprised of your homepage, and maybe a second popular page on your site or Sitelinks if you’re lucky. (Or if you’re Wal-Mart, you spent big bucks on search engine reputation management and have crowded others out of almost all the top 10 spots through secondary country-specific sites and subdomains.) BUT: Your homepage likely doesn’t convert as well as a landing page could. Since you get to choose where your SEM listing takes visitors, you might get better conversions than just letting them come to your homepage.
Just my 2 cents.
Great point. Driving customers to a specific landing page can definitely have a big impact on conversions!